| Information | Review |
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Nathan Schine
PHYS404 Anonymous 03/30/2026 |
This class did frankly kick my ass. This has been my hardest physics course at UMD, didn't get the grade I wanted full stop. All that aside, I did learn A TON of valuable things from this class. Nathan may design tough exams, but they are fair if you follow the lectures thoroughly, use the problem sets as places to learn (not score points), and work through things with other people. I think the biggest damper on your success in this class is not working with other people, and if you make the time to do that, you will learn a lot from this class. Nathan approaches this class with an uncanny awareness of what our expected background knowledge should be, and he targets the course to build off of that. Go to his office hours, ask questions, and put time into this course. The more time you spend engaging in this course, the more you learn. Go to lecture, not everything is based on the textbook because Nathan can't find one that is at the right depth but covers all the things he wants to (from what he has said to me during office hours). In slight critique to the one star review, the lectures, psets, and exams may have not completely overlapped, but I am certain that if something wasn't covered in one of the three, it was covered in the other two. That may mean some lecture topics will not be on the pset but will appear on the exam, that is not something we don't see in most classes, but it lets him cover more material and ultimately, the tests revealed the areas where I was not fully understanding things and helped me learn. If you need a fantastic grade (for a scholarship, something like that), I would weigh taking this class a little but would still encourage it. If you just want to learn, don't be afraid to take this class, your grade may not be what you want, but it will be worth the tuition and then some and you can succeed if you can commit to the grind that is Schine's 404. |
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Nathan Schine
PHYS404 Anonymous 12/18/2025 |
Oh boy, I've been waiting to write this one for a while. This was not the hardest class I've ever taken, but it was by far the stupidest. From the very beginning, when I realized the course was graded 90% on tests and Professor Schine said "The goal of the homework is to teach; the goal of the tests is to test. So don’t expect the homework to be very similar to the tests." (his words, not mine), I knew we were in for a wild ride. Now, to be fair to Nathan, PHYS404 is one of the hardest courses in an already ridiculously difficult subject, so of course, this was going to be a challenging class. However, Nathan not only doesn't help you get out of this quicksand, he actively pushes you into the pit while simultaneously being blissfully unaware he's doing anything wrong. For starters, the lectures are awful. The entire class is spent doing random integral derivations of formulae that we're just straight-up given, and no, we are not tested on said derivations. Just read the textbook, you will get infinitely more use out of that than ANY of these rants. Indeed, Nathan seems utterly oblivious to the fact that no one can understand a word he says, and continues to chug along as if he's talking to 52 clones of himself rather than students who need to learn stuff. Then the homeworks, where questions are separated into four categories ranging from 1-4 (easy to hard). In reality, only 1s are doable, 2s are insane, 3s are impossible, and 4s have nothing to do with the subject. And at last, there are the tests. Those things that are worth literally 90% of the grade? You guessed it, they're impossible. I'm talking averages in the mid-40s, highs of mid-80s, and third quartiles of upper-20s. I wouldn't even be THIS mad if they actually had anything to do with lectures or homeworks, but of course, as admitted by him, they don't. Why even study? I say without a hint of irony or hyperbole that I would have gotten more use out of my homeworks and notes by burning them at a campfire for warmth. The only saving grace is that they're curved into oblivion because everyone face-plants on them, but then what was the point of taking them in the first place? In fact, what is the point of anything in this class? The tests have nothing to do with the homeworks, homeworks have nothing to do with the lectures, and the lectures have nothing to do with the tests, which themselves mean nothing since everyone does so badly that everyone is curved regardless. This all leads to one damning question: Why in God's name am I even taking this class in the first place? |