PHYS375 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/07/2024	Please don't take him. I don't have too much to say past that. Just don't. It's worse than you think.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/06/2024	Dr. Hill is, without a doubt, the worst professor I’ve ever had. His teaching is horrible, and it’s blatantly obvious he doesn’t care. We’ve finished all six labs, but only two are graded. Almost none of our prelabs or homework are graded either, so we have no idea how we’re doing in the class. He seems bored out of his mind during lectures, and his slides are a mess—completely unclear and unhelpful. For the exam, we were allowed a one-page note sheet (front and back). I copied one of his slides word-for-word onto my note sheet and wrote the exact same thing on the exam, only for him to mark it wrong, claiming it was “missing something.” The exam wasn’t graded until after the drop/add period, which feels unfair. I attended all the lectures, but honestly, they were useless. Half the time, I was just staring at the wall because he didn’t explain anything well and it was difficult to focus. He gave pop quizzes that he called “extra credit,” but they barely impacted grades and were nearly impossible to pass because no one understood his teaching. On the first exam, there was an extra credit question, but we later learned it was just factored in as a tiny bonus like the pop quizzes, not real extra credit. One of the most stressful parts was his random rotation of lab partners every lab. The labs were three hours long, and while that’s normal, Dr. Hill only stuck around for the first 30 minutes, leaving the rest to the TAs. A lot of the equipment was faulty, and some labs were nearly impossible to finish on time. Bottom line: do not take Dr. Hill. Seriously, avoid him at all costs. My advisor warned me not to take his class, and I regret not listening. If you can, choose someone else, take it over the summer, or just hope he retires and take it at a later semester.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2024	I found the professor to be not as bad as the other reviews have said, but also leaves something much more to be desired from a professor. Here's what you should know about Dr. Hill if you intend to take PHYS375 with him: 1. I don't think he's particularly rude or disrespectful; I even thought he was caring when he gave me my feedback on the lab report. However, he may often ramble while answering your questions and can be a bit intimidating when he doesn't see students asking anything in lecture. I mostly just found him eccentric. 2. What's pretty crazy about PHYS375 is that it consists both a lab component and a lecture component, which is very time consuming. Combine that with how busy our professor was with his research, it led him to rarely show up in our labs and spend a lot of time in lecture covering lab material than thoroughly discuss the theory behind optics. When he discussed theoretical topics in lecture, he often included really long derivations and formulas that came out of nowhere. In all, it made the lectures extremely mundane and made you want to leave class, I dare say. 3. The homework...yikes. There were questions that were simply too long or too complicated to solve by a busy undergrad student. The problems themselves aren't inherently difficult to understand conceptually, but some require a lot of steps to complete. But way more often than not, your TA will not expect you to get everything right on the homework. You wanna know how long it took our TA to grade the first homework set? 20 hours. 4. It relieves a bit of stress that the exams are open note and are based off of problems mostly from the homework. However, the exam can still be brutal even with all your notes lol. Each of our two exams was worth 10 % of our grade, so it's fine if you tank on one of them. I would spend more time re-assessing your lab report as you can get feedback from him on that anytime you want. 5. I think he may have a bias towards students who attend his lectures and/or asks questions. He even gives out pop-quizzes from time to time to see who's attending. Based on how I did on the first exam and how I thought I did on the second exam and lab report, I really don't get why he gave me an A. Maybe all you have to do is to just attend, do well on the labs, and try to do well on the lab report. TL;DR: If you want a professor that can teach you optics really well, don't take him. If you don't have any other choices, you'll be fine with him. You'll get a good grade if you try.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/11/2024	The TA’s were an absolute god send. Professor Hill is perhaps the worst lecturer I’ve had the displeasure of learning from. Routinely tells the class that “you need to derive this” on your own time, outside of homework, for fundamental equations/concepts related to this class. God forbid you have to ask a question, because he is very dismissive and clearly has a superiority complex when answering. He will typically show up for the first 15-30 minutes of your lab section. Multiple times, he’s told me to set up my experimental system a certain way, just for me to be told it was wrong by one of the TA’s. He is also incredibly nit-picky when it comes to writing. He docked points from a lab report for not writing about something that was discussed a literal paragraph after he left the comment. There is a formal lab report worth 20% of your grade, and he gave everyone a 50% on the first draft (with no indication of what your letter grade would have been) as “encouragement to resubmit.”
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Anonymous 05/11/2024	This course was carried by the TAs. Dr. Hill was meh. The assignments themselves actually weren't so bad, with the homeworks and exams being reasonable in my eyes, but the lectures were sometimes hard to follow, leaving me confused on material without knowing what questions to ask. Dr. Hill does care about your learning, but it sometimes is hard to tell. You can definitely do better for 375 professor, but it appears he has improved over past semesters.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/09/2024	Overall, I had a positive experience with professor Hill. Yes, he isn't the best lecturer, but there is a lot material to cover in this class so it's a bit hard to teach no matter what. Optics with Hill will force you to learn, and some of the experiments are pretty cool and demonstrate optical concepts well. Hill gives bonus quizzes which count for extra credit and there is no final. Neither of his midterms are too crazy and both are open note. Some students find his blunt manner off-putting, but don't take it personally. I actually appreciated his directness and did not find him condescending or rude at all. If you ask him for help on an assignment or lab or to explain some concept, he will actually be quite helpful. He definitely knows a lot about optics and once worked with me for an hour straight during lab period just to help me understand one part. I hear that in the past he may have been a worse, but as of spring 2024 professor Hill seems to have improved significantly from previous reviews.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/26/2024	Greatest professor of all time! Stays in the lab the whole way and is extremely caring and kind. Very engaging lecturer and he ignited the spark of physics in me.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/06/2024	This guy is just not cool. Super disrespectful. Says you can ask him for help, but when you do he just says, "well you should know how to do this" and leaves it at that. Grades hard based off nothing. Homeworks were really difficult, and were often extended by the TAs because of that. Avoid if possible, it feels like this guy wants to spite you a little bit for taking his class.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Anonymous 12/10/2023	He's not a good lecturer, not an awful one, but I feel his lectures generally left me not understanding the material better than had I just picked up the textbook myself. If you could take the class with another professor, it would be optimal, but it's not so bad you should delay your graduation over it. His lecturing style mostly consists of throwing an equation up on the board and trying to explain it, he doesn't get caught up in derivations too often but when he does it is a stalling point for the class. To his merit he will try to help students when they ask after class, but if it should take too long, or should he not see a clear way to answer the student he tends to brush it aside and keep moving. Overall, very dispassionate and sterile as package, which is workable but clearly detrimental. Key Points: -Medicore and dispassionate lecturer, to the point it feels detrimental to understanding. -Homework is often incongruent with lecture, this could be because he doesn't reach his objectives in lecture, or it could be that they were simply taken from various textbooks and plastered together because they were vaguely on topic in lieu of making more apropos coursework. This is in addition to asking for derivations we did not even approach in class as "original" problems of his. -Assignments were often unclear in their guidelines (due to typos or a complete lack of direction), we did not get a decent picture of what he wanted from the semester lab report until after the first draft, and even then, things were quite murky. He does not communicate his expectations well on project-based work, to the point the first draft of the report's average grades were dreadful. -Labs were with the TAs and went generally fine, with the expected tedium of having to handle things like lenses with your hands. -The TAs this semester were absolutely amazing which may bias my rating of Professor Hill positively as I might not be able to fully understand the shortcomings I might have experienced in the hands of less astute TAs. -To his credit his exams are fair, he went open-note for them this semester, but they are verbatim the material covered on homeworks and in class.
Wendell Hill PHYS375 Anonymous 11/29/2023	This guy is a BUM. Thank goodness the labs were run by the TA's (who were absolutely delightful, I might add), otherwise I would have had a completely miserable experience. Here's a breakdown of all the problems I had with Hill's 375 class: -There were several homeworks in this class. And they were TOUGH. I was showing up to office hours every week because this dude would barely give any equations or examples in class and then would expect us to write PhD dissertations on the homeworks. I found myself using Google and finding random papers or textbooks to figure out how to solve the homework problems. Lectures were USELESS. On the bright side, the homeworks were graded by a TA who was super generous. It's just crazy to me how my lab homework was harder than my main physics classes. -The class had two lectures a week, which I learned absolutely nothing from. People quickly realized lecture was useless and soon enough over the class stopped showing up. Hill started giving pop quizzes just to get people to show up to his lectures. -SOOO many typos on assignments. You would think this would be a nitpick, but there were multiple times there were unsolvable questions on the HW because of typos. -Thank goodness, Hill did not grade lab notebooks, pre-labs, or homeworks. The stuff he did grade, however (the lab report, for example), he made sure to grade as harshly as possible. For the first draft of the lab report, mans gave no guidelines and then flunked just about everyone's papers. What the heck, man. If you can afford to wait another semester to take this class with a different professor, I would. If not, just pray the TA's are good because you aren't gonna learn anything from this guy.
Alicia Kollar PHYS375 Anonymous 06/28/2022	This professor was very absent. She was rarely in class and did not hold true to her office hours. Many students have asked her for in person appointments, to which she said no. The grading criteria was also ambiguous, and she did not explicitly state where people would get points off for the lab reports. Furthermore, her general response to people's concern is just "this course is a more advanced course". Would avoid in the future.
Steven Anlage PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/25/2010	Professor Anlage is excellent. Really helps you out when things are going wrong in the lab, and is very patient about it too. He is a good lecturer - explains things well and answers any questions you can have. Definitely recommend him.
Steven Anlage PHYS375 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/17/2009	I've had Dr. Anlage for two classes now, 375 and 402. He's the man. Real cheerful, and does a great job teaching the material. You might want to think about looking ahead in the book before going to lecture though, because he tends to move pretty quickly.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/07/2024

Please don't take him. I don't have too much to say past that. Just don't. It's worse than you think.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/06/2024

Dr. Hill is, without a doubt, the worst professor I’ve ever had. His teaching is horrible, and it’s blatantly obvious he doesn’t care. We’ve finished all six labs, but only two are graded. Almost none of our prelabs or homework are graded either, so we have no idea how we’re doing in the class. He seems bored out of his mind during lectures, and his slides are a mess—completely unclear and unhelpful. For the exam, we were allowed a one-page note sheet (front and back). I copied one of his slides word-for-word onto my note sheet and wrote the exact same thing on the exam, only for him to mark it wrong, claiming it was “missing something.” The exam wasn’t graded until after the drop/add period, which feels unfair. I attended all the lectures, but honestly, they were useless. Half the time, I was just staring at the wall because he didn’t explain anything well and it was difficult to focus. He gave pop quizzes that he called “extra credit,” but they barely impacted grades and were nearly impossible to pass because no one understood his teaching. On the first exam, there was an extra credit question, but we later learned it was just factored in as a tiny bonus like the pop quizzes, not real extra credit. One of the most stressful parts was his random rotation of lab partners every lab. The labs were three hours long, and while that’s normal, Dr. Hill only stuck around for the first 30 minutes, leaving the rest to the TAs. A lot of the equipment was faulty, and some labs were nearly impossible to finish on time. Bottom line: do not take Dr. Hill. Seriously, avoid him at all costs. My advisor warned me not to take his class, and I regret not listening. If you can, choose someone else, take it over the summer, or just hope he retires and take it at a later semester.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/21/2024

I found the professor to be not as bad as the other reviews have said, but also leaves something much more to be desired from a professor. Here's what you should know about Dr. Hill if you intend to take PHYS375 with him: 1. I don't think he's particularly rude or disrespectful; I even thought he was caring when he gave me my feedback on the lab report. However, he may often ramble while answering your questions and can be a bit intimidating when he doesn't see students asking anything in lecture. I mostly just found him eccentric. 2. What's pretty crazy about PHYS375 is that it consists both a lab component and a lecture component, which is very time consuming. Combine that with how busy our professor was with his research, it led him to rarely show up in our labs and spend a lot of time in lecture covering lab material than thoroughly discuss the theory behind optics. When he discussed theoretical topics in lecture, he often included really long derivations and formulas that came out of nowhere. In all, it made the lectures extremely mundane and made you want to leave class, I dare say. 3. The homework...yikes. There were questions that were simply too long or too complicated to solve by a busy undergrad student. The problems themselves aren't inherently difficult to understand conceptually, but some require a lot of steps to complete. But way more often than not, your TA will not expect you to get everything right on the homework. You wanna know how long it took our TA to grade the first homework set? 20 hours. 4. It relieves a bit of stress that the exams are open note and are based off of problems mostly from the homework. However, the exam can still be brutal even with all your notes lol. Each of our two exams was worth 10 % of our grade, so it's fine if you tank on one of them. I would spend more time re-assessing your lab report as you can get feedback from him on that anytime you want. 5. I think he may have a bias towards students who attend his lectures and/or asks questions. He even gives out pop-quizzes from time to time to see who's attending. Based on how I did on the first exam and how I thought I did on the second exam and lab report, I really don't get why he gave me an A. Maybe all you have to do is to just attend, do well on the labs, and try to do well on the lab report. TL;DR: If you want a professor that can teach you optics really well, don't take him. If you don't have any other choices, you'll be fine with him. You'll get a good grade if you try.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/11/2024

The TA’s were an absolute god send. Professor Hill is perhaps the worst lecturer I’ve had the displeasure of learning from. Routinely tells the class that “you need to derive this” on your own time, outside of homework, for fundamental equations/concepts related to this class. God forbid you have to ask a question, because he is very dismissive and clearly has a superiority complex when answering. He will typically show up for the first 15-30 minutes of your lab section. Multiple times, he’s told me to set up my experimental system a certain way, just for me to be told it was wrong by one of the TA’s. He is also incredibly nit-picky when it comes to writing. He docked points from a lab report for not writing about something that was discussed a literal paragraph after he left the comment. There is a formal lab report worth 20% of your grade, and he gave everyone a 50% on the first draft (with no indication of what your letter grade would have been) as “encouragement to resubmit.”

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Anonymous
05/11/2024

This course was carried by the TAs. Dr. Hill was meh. The assignments themselves actually weren't so bad, with the homeworks and exams being reasonable in my eyes, but the lectures were sometimes hard to follow, leaving me confused on material without knowing what questions to ask. Dr. Hill does care about your learning, but it sometimes is hard to tell. You can definitely do better for 375 professor, but it appears he has improved over past semesters.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/09/2024

Overall, I had a positive experience with professor Hill. Yes, he isn't the best lecturer, but there is a lot material to cover in this class so it's a bit hard to teach no matter what. Optics with Hill will force you to learn, and some of the experiments are pretty cool and demonstrate optical concepts well. Hill gives bonus quizzes which count for extra credit and there is no final. Neither of his midterms are too crazy and both are open note. Some students find his blunt manner off-putting, but don't take it personally. I actually appreciated his directness and did not find him condescending or rude at all. If you ask him for help on an assignment or lab or to explain some concept, he will actually be quite helpful. He definitely knows a lot about optics and once worked with me for an hour straight during lab period just to help me understand one part. I hear that in the past he may have been a worse, but as of spring 2024 professor Hill seems to have improved significantly from previous reviews.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
03/26/2024

Greatest professor of all time! Stays in the lab the whole way and is extremely caring and kind. Very engaging lecturer and he ignited the spark of physics in me.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/06/2024

This guy is just not cool. Super disrespectful. Says you can ask him for help, but when you do he just says, "well you should know how to do this" and leaves it at that. Grades hard based off nothing. Homeworks were really difficult, and were often extended by the TAs because of that. Avoid if possible, it feels like this guy wants to spite you a little bit for taking his class.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Anonymous
12/10/2023

He's not a good lecturer, not an awful one, but I feel his lectures generally left me not understanding the material better than had I just picked up the textbook myself. If you could take the class with another professor, it would be optimal, but it's not so bad you should delay your graduation over it. His lecturing style mostly consists of throwing an equation up on the board and trying to explain it, he doesn't get caught up in derivations too often but when he does it is a stalling point for the class. To his merit he will try to help students when they ask after class, but if it should take too long, or should he not see a clear way to answer the student he tends to brush it aside and keep moving. Overall, very dispassionate and sterile as package, which is workable but clearly detrimental. Key Points: -Medicore and dispassionate lecturer, to the point it feels detrimental to understanding. -Homework is often incongruent with lecture, this could be because he doesn't reach his objectives in lecture, or it could be that they were simply taken from various textbooks and plastered together because they were vaguely on topic in lieu of making more apropos coursework. This is in addition to asking for derivations we did not even approach in class as "original" problems of his. -Assignments were often unclear in their guidelines (due to typos or a complete lack of direction), we did not get a decent picture of what he wanted from the semester lab report until after the first draft, and even then, things were quite murky. He does not communicate his expectations well on project-based work, to the point the first draft of the report's average grades were dreadful. -Labs were with the TAs and went generally fine, with the expected tedium of having to handle things like lenses with your hands. -The TAs this semester were absolutely amazing which may bias my rating of Professor Hill positively as I might not be able to fully understand the shortcomings I might have experienced in the hands of less astute TAs. -To his credit his exams are fair, he went open-note for them this semester, but they are verbatim the material covered on homeworks and in class.

Wendell Hill
PHYS375

Anonymous
11/29/2023

This guy is a BUM. Thank goodness the labs were run by the TA's (who were absolutely delightful, I might add), otherwise I would have had a completely miserable experience. Here's a breakdown of all the problems I had with Hill's 375 class: -There were several homeworks in this class. And they were TOUGH. I was showing up to office hours every week because this dude would barely give any equations or examples in class and then would expect us to write PhD dissertations on the homeworks. I found myself using Google and finding random papers or textbooks to figure out how to solve the homework problems. Lectures were USELESS. On the bright side, the homeworks were graded by a TA who was super generous. It's just crazy to me how my lab homework was harder than my main physics classes. -The class had two lectures a week, which I learned absolutely nothing from. People quickly realized lecture was useless and soon enough over the class stopped showing up. Hill started giving pop quizzes just to get people to show up to his lectures. -SOOO many typos on assignments. You would think this would be a nitpick, but there were multiple times there were unsolvable questions on the HW because of typos. -Thank goodness, Hill did not grade lab notebooks, pre-labs, or homeworks. The stuff he did grade, however (the lab report, for example), he made sure to grade as harshly as possible. For the first draft of the lab report, mans gave no guidelines and then flunked just about everyone's papers. What the heck, man. If you can afford to wait another semester to take this class with a different professor, I would. If not, just pray the TA's are good because you aren't gonna learn anything from this guy.

Alicia Kollar
PHYS375

Anonymous
06/28/2022

This professor was very absent. She was rarely in class and did not hold true to her office hours. Many students have asked her for in person appointments, to which she said no. The grading criteria was also ambiguous, and she did not explicitly state where people would get points off for the lab reports. Furthermore, her general response to people's concern is just "this course is a more advanced course". Would avoid in the future.

Steven Anlage
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/25/2010

Professor Anlage is excellent. Really helps you out when things are going wrong in the lab, and is very patient about it too. He is a good lecturer - explains things well and answers any questions you can have. Definitely recommend him.

Steven Anlage
PHYS375

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/17/2009

I've had Dr. Anlage for two classes now, 375 and 402. He's the man. Real cheerful, and does a great job teaching the material. You might want to think about looking ahead in the book before going to lecture though, because he tends to move pretty quickly.

Reviews for PHYS375