Wolfgang Losert

This professor has taught: BIPH708A, BIPH708B, MSML699, PHYS131, PHYS132, PHYS299L, PHYS399L, PHYS798N

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Wolfgang Losert PHYS132 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/22/2024	Losert is a good professor. I just hate the life science physics classes. Losert is passionate about physics and he can be funny at times as well. However, the head TA taught 1/3 of the lectures because Losert was at a conference like every other week. He does TopHat questions just like 131, and some of them are graded for accuracy, but he'll literally tell you the answers in class so as long as you're there, you will get it right. ExpertTA homework was time consuming and annoying. It's literally impossible to fail this class. You don't need to know anything about the content going into the exams because you get a double-sided formula sheet and the curve is insane, and you can bs enough to get a solid grade. Also, the exams have retakes, where your new grade is the average of the original and the retake (although I've heard the retakes are much harder). Exam 2 was nothing like the practice. Labs are easier than 131 - once you get through the couple of harder lab reports at the beginning, the rest are easy and don't require a whole lab report - just answering questions. It's also highly dependent on if your group members actually do the work. Overall, I've learned nothing in this class. 131 and 132 are a joke. I would've been better off taking the non-life science physics courses.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS132 Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/29/2024	prof is chill, make sure you do the clickers. class is 'mandatory' because of the clickers. exams are annoying but the curve is insane. for the second exam, a 75 was curved to a 93-ish. decent professor but rlly boring lecture, he loves his work but the content in class and the content on the exams are very irregular and don't match up.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS132 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/29/2023	He’s a great professor! He made the class funny with his demos and tried his best to make all the hard concepts easy. I would definitely recommend him to everyone as he made physics fun.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS132 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/22/2023	He’s a great professor who's always willing to answer questions and provide help. If you put in effort you'll get an A.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS132 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/08/2023	I highly recommend Dr. Losert. This was his first time teaching this class in years and he had no trouble diving back in. He is a very passionate lecturer and always takes time to answer everyone’s questions during class. He is very receptive to feedback and always ready to help when you email him. Homework and Tophat questions were fair, on exams he allows you to make a front and back equation sheet. Both the exams and your overall grade are curved at least 10%, so it’s difficult to get a low score in the class. Exams are only 35% of the grade, so there is a much greater emphasis on your textbook questions, lab participation, and homework.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS131 Expecting a B jcp5383 10/20/2014	Dr. Losert has really awesome intentions, but he just cannot teach. Also, the new physics course for biology majors is really not working out. They made this course so that bio majors can "think" about a problem in a bio-related way. Although the intentions are great, it is poorly managed and so far, none of my friends like it.
Wolfgang Losert Expecting a C Anonymous 02/13/2012	Unfortunately I have to agree with the reviews below: Losert is a nice guy that wants you to do well. Despite his intentions, he was the worst physics prof I've have so far. The book choice was horrendous.. The lectures were abstract and confusing (he often confused himself to the point of "uhh forget that we'll do it next time").. Nice guy, very poor teaching ability. Wait until a different semester if you can!!
Wolfgang Losert Expecting a B Anonymous 02/06/2012	Pros: Prof. Losert is kind and does his best to be considerate and fair. He was extremely responsive to emails and if you had any serious problem that you needed to get fixed he would try and be very accommodating. Cons: 1) Unfortunately, he tries to be "fair" but despite his efforts his class was far from it. His 374 course alone took up more time in my week than all three of my other classes combined! In general, between readings, review, and homework (not including studying for exams) I spent about 15-20 hours a week doing 374 work. Considering I've learned most of the material beforehand, the fact that it took so long is absurd. I felt lost all the time no matter how well I recognized the material. 2) Prof. Losert always chose problems from the book that took what we knew and reworded everything so we have to figure out what it's referring to and then applied the math to the most convoluted system imaginable. Another reviewer mentioned "manipulating a sea of expressions"--this was an accurate description of enough algebra/calculus to fill up an entire 5x8ft blackboard PLUS some for practically every problem! So again, despite Prof. Losert attempts at being fair, I don't believe he fully understood how much work he was giving his students. 3) That leads me into the worst problem--the textbook. Apparently ours was updated to be "much better than the last one". Maybe, I wouldn't know. But our book (Essential Mathematical Methods-Riley/Hobson) is still ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE! This book is intended to be a reference book; as a reference book it might be good, but nobody should ever LEARN from this book because it skips a ton of steps during derivations, it switches variables randomly without notifying you, and worst of all it doesn't provide ANY concrete examples (that show steps at least) that can be applied to more difficult problems. Unfortunately this course is required for physics majors, so despite my bad review I will say this class IS doable. Before starting the homeworks, its crucial to read the chapter! Oftentimes doing the book problems without reading means you'll waste a lot of time doing the wrong calculations. Secondly, keep in touch with Prof. Losert--as I said he is very considerate and will do his best to help you out. I managed to get a good grade in this course, but at the expense of two other ones. Keep on top of your work and you'll do ok.
Wolfgang Losert Anonymous 10/13/2011	I do not recommend this class. While Dr. Losert is nice, the homework and quizzes which account for 40% are ridiculous (the homework much more so than the quizzes). In Dr. Losert's defense, he does prep us well enough for his tests, which are fairly reasonable, but other than that I strongly advise against taking this class. The main issue I have with this course is the TA(Hwanmun Kim). It's enough that we spend hours upon hours doing the homework, but the TA doesn't even bother to take the time to read through all of your work. He ends up taking off lots of points for things you would have gotten credit for had he only gone through your work. The TA is by far the worst TA I've ever had and I recommend avoiding him at all costs.
Wolfgang Losert Expecting a B- Anonymous 01/09/2011	Before I start, I'll say that Dr. Losert is a very nice guy, and I think that he earnestly tried his hardest for this class; things just did not go as he or anyone had hoped. I was hoping to learn a series of mathematical techniques to help me in the 400-level physics courses (i.e. separation of variables, residue theorem, basics of PDEs, Fourier analysis, etc); this did not happen. He was very nice in trying to help students, offering office hours, listening to students feelings about the course, etc. Most of the problems of this course stemmed from the choice of textbook (Mathematical Methods for Physical Sciences, by Roel Snieder). This is one of the worst books I've seen, despite what reviews on sites like amazon.com say. This book contains literally no examples whatsoever, fudged and sloppy notations, and frequent error. The book's philosophy is the make the student derive all the results his/herself, with 'guided' problems. So with no examples, a brief introduction will be given to the student to give a context of the concept, then the book quickly drowns the student in problems to derive all the results of mathematical physics. While this philosophy sounds excellent, in practice, it was a disaster. Mathematical proofs are virtually "hand-waived" and sort of bullshitted. Nearly all of the homework assigned to us from Losert were in this book. I could do homework for 7-8 hours (or more) from this book, and literally learn not a single thing. Problems were just mostly algebra to manipulate a sea of expressions nobody understood, then some "hand-waiving", like say, insert an equals ("=") sign between, expressions 18.32 and 18.35, and wham! We're suppose to learn something and gain a higher understanding of the concept. While I'm sure Dr. Losert would a be clear lecturer in other classes, few had any idea what was going on the entire time during this class. He made frequent errors on the board, forgetting constants and forgetting what variable we were integrating over; he was called out on stuff like this seemingly all the time. Once again, I think that this all stemmed from choice of the horrible textbook. Dr. Losert really should have picked the book by Mary Boas. On another note, we did deviate from the book a little when Dr. Girvan came in to class to substitute our lectures by teaching us some nonlinear dynamics. These were ok, and homework and test problems included such. While Dr. Loserts intentions were good, things just did not work out. I learned almost nothing in this class. I got zeros (out of 20 points) on a few quizzes that I was there for, while the averages hovered around a 25% on these quizzes. Indeed, a testament to how little people were learning. Luckily, quizzes only counted 10%. The only way I passed this class was that Losert made his tests virtually identical to quiz problems (the quizzes which everyone failed, but quiz solutions were posted prior to exam, so we just memorized the quiz solutions to study for exams), and that his reviews before exams told us virtually exactly what would be on the exam. The sloppy homeworks, I say again, were virtually useless to study, as was the sloppy class notes. Next time around, I think that this class will be better, because hopefully Dr. Losert would have chosen a different book.
Wolfgang Losert Anonymous 01/01/2011	probably the worst class ive ever taken. he was unable to explain anything, or even perform the solutions to the homework problems. to make matters worse, the textbook only had problems. no explanation of the material or how to solve them, or answers in the back. i am happy to be done with this class.
Wolfgang Losert PHYS161 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/14/2009	Not a good professor to have if you are taking physics for the first time in your life. Expect to rely on your textbook for help because he spends most of his lectures starting a problem and then concluding that the problem must be solved with additional concepts and techniques that we have not yet learned. He is not very organized and never finishes his sentences. The exams were okay and there was a curve on each one, but be prepared to be bored.