I was wondering is any upper year students who took Physics 1B03 could give me advice on the midterm. I really want to do well because I don't want Physics to kill my GPA, but I always hear about how hard the midterm is and how a lot of people fail it. Does anyone have advice on how to get over an 80 on the midterm? I plan on studying very hard and I have Nejat as a professor. The midterm is March 3rd!

pepper your angus

as someone who had 100 in the course going in to the exam back in the day, you should have done and figured out all of the CAPA questions by yourself and fully understood them. by fully understand i dont mean know how to redo the question with different numbers. but how they could have given you different info, or modified the question somehow and what would the new answer be. by far the most useful part of the course lectures were the conceptual iClicker questions. if you review those questions and fully understand those concepts (again, by going through in your head how you can alter the system and how that changes the answer) that will get you at least 20% of the test that most people don't get. actually if you google word for word the iclicker questions you may be able to find a list of similar question banks, this really helped me study. the other thing is that to be SURE you got the answer right, you need to figure out why the other answers are wrong. they purposely give snake answers that SEEM right if you made a common mistake! so if you can identifiy which common mistake (used sin instead of cos theta) leads to incorrect answers, you can be much more sure you weren't yourself snaked.

Do the past exam from Physics 1D03, if you can get good marks on it you should have no problem with 1B03.

Originally Posted by topkek

Do the past exam from Physics 1D03, if you can get good marks on it you should have no problem with 1B03.

lol 1d03 is probably easier due to the short answer.

if you havent already, read the book before lectures.

Originally Posted by yoni

as someone who had 100 in the course going in to the exam back in the day, you should have done and figured out all of the CAPA questions by yourself and fully understood them. by fully understand i dont mean know how to redo the question with different numbers. but how they could have given you different info, or modified the question somehow and what would the new answer be. by far the most useful part of the course lectures were the conceptual iClicker questions. if you review those questions and fully understand those concepts (again, by going through in your head how you can alter the system and how that changes the answer) that will get you at least 20% of the test that most people don't get. actually if you google word for word the iclicker questions you may be able to find a list of similar question banks, this really helped me study. the other thing is that to be SURE you got the answer right, you need to figure out why the other answers are wrong. they purposely give snake answers that SEEM right if you made a common mistake! so if you can identifiy which common mistake (used sin instead of cos theta) leads to incorrect answers, you can be much more sure you weren't yourself snaked.

Wow 100! That's my pipe dream. LOL. Thank you for your tips, that's really helpful, I'm going to make sure I do that!!! Would you recommend doing textbook questions? I started to do them at the beginning of the year but stopped after dynamics because I have no time with midterms and all. However during reading week I plan I'll have a lot of time, so would do you think it's a good use of time to do the text book questions?

Originally Posted by Silver

lol 1d03 is probably easier due to the short answer.

if you havent already, read the book before lectures.

Uggh I've been trying to do that. I idd that for the first 4 units we did but have slowly stopped. Go get back on that. Thank you for your advice!