You'll get a kick out of Physics 1 at Georgia Tech if you even remotely like the CS Department.  As usual, Georgia Tech's physics has taken after the traditional GT manner of dealing with things. That is: Cram as many kids as you possibly can into the class, make them do homework and tests that are all computer graded for all or no credit so if they miss the answer by even .01, its wrong.  They don't teach jack shit. They give you a book that has about 2 pages of material per section, and somehow, you are supposed to be able to solve all of your homework from that. This of course is the best thing to do because it requires the least effort by the school and the maximum dicking of the students.

    Let's take a minute and look at WebAssign, the 'perfect homework delivery service.  Instead of giving you workable, useful problems that will prepare you to take tests, now all the professors have to do is open their Physics book and point to a bunch of random problems, and there it is.  Every student has to work them and turn them in by a certain time with nothing to do on the part of the professor but to sit back and enjoy the ass raping of the students.  You might think that this isn't that bad, but you have to experience it to know.  The problems take you an unGodly amount of time to do, because of their intentionally cryptic wording, so after you submit and find that you missed about 3/4 of them, you have to go back and correct them, which wastes even more time out of your life.

    Surely, you're thinking, there has to be a way around all this WebAssign bullshit, but you're wrong.  Some might revert to the solution manual, which, I feel is a shame if anyone has ever paid money for.  The solution manual is even more useless than the book.  It more closely resembles an answer key than a manual.  Instead of showing you how to work a particular problem, it instead shows just a general magic formula into which you are supposed to plug in all the numbers and get an answer.  Then it skips through all the steps and simplifications and gives you an answer which you were supposed to have gotten.  The irony is that if you go back and plug in their own numbers into their own formula, half the time, you don't even get the answer they got.  On top of that, the entire manual is littered with errors.  They just randomly decide to omit parenthesis and operational signs that would change the outcome completely.  But after going through and explaining all of this, it kind of made me realize why this should be such a popular book among the professors here at Georgia Tech. 

        It doesn't make sense to me how people who are paid to teach you would decide that this Webassign is the best tool for teaching students.  I mean, obviously, students do not benefit from doing homework and getting it all wrong, and still not even knowing what they did wrong.  You might go talk to your TA, right?  No, not really, because you don't have one.  Your one stop resource for anything you might need in your class is your professor, who might I add, probably won't even return your emails unless he feels like it is worth his while.  I emailed my professor 3 times before I finally got a response to me asking to set up an appointment to meet with him.  When I asked him why he didn't reply to the first two emails, he tried to play stupid and say he didn't get them.  But anyways, back to Webassign.  Why is it 'the perfect homework delivery system' as they claim it to be on their main page?  I'll tell you why.  Because it costs this school $150 dollars per course that they decide to use Webassign.  That's right.  If you go to http://www.webassign.net/info/pricing.html you will see all the details to this dirty scheme they have.  It cost the school $250 for the first course they ever decided to offer with WebAssign, and now only $150 for every course after that.  It costs them $6.50 for every student they enroll.  In the end, all it boils down to is money - nothing more.  That's why they can cram lecture halls full of kids and pretend to lecture them on topics that will be useful to them, and then bend them over and fuck them raw, just so that the Physics department doesn't have to do shit.  Did you ever wonder why your Physics recitation had the same number of students and the same teacher as your lecture?  I mean, this is a 4 credit hour class, just like Calc 1, 2, and 3, etc.  And it is just as heavily dependent on calculations as those classes are.  So why is it that you can't get the one on one help for Physics that you got in those classes?  Why isn't there recitation in a smaller class size where people can actually ask questions instead of listening to the idiots in the first row ask totally unrelated questions that waste everyone's time?  Well now you know why - it's all about some fucking money.  And they call this shit teaching....

    Listen to what nerve some Physics professors around here have in this student's story:  "I had a physics professor once who wouldn't bump my grade up from a 69.4 to a C. I found some homework problems that were marked wrong and it bumped my grade to a 69.6 and he said I had to have a 70. He was saying the physics
department was bitching b/c his class's GPA for the semester was a 2.5, apparently to high." - Anonymous
 

    If that's not bad enough, take a look at the kind of gay ass problems they give for homework. How much homosexuality can a guy take?:

•     [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 5, Problem 14.] On the current tour of the rock band Dead Wait, the show opens with a dark stage. Suddenly there is the sound of a large automobile accident. Lead singer Sharika comes sliding to the front of the stage on her knees. Her initial speed is 3.4 m/s. After sliding 1.9 m, she comes to rest in a dry ice fog as flash pots explode on either side. What is the coefficient of kinetic friction between Sharika and the stage?**
   

•     [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 6, Problem 83.] The movie crew arrives in the Badlands ready to shoot a scene. The script calls for a car to crash into a vertical rock face at 130 km/h. Unfortunately, the car won't start, and there is no mechanic in sight. They are about to skulk back to the studio to face the producer's wrath when the cameraman gets an idea. They use a crane to lift the car by its rear end and then drop it, filming at an angle that makes the car appear to be traveling horizontally. How high should the 790 kg car be lifted so that it reaches a speed of 130 km/h in the fall?**
   

•     [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 7, Problem 33.] Walking by a pond, you find a rope attached to a tree limb 6.0 m off the ground. You decide to use the rope to swing out over the pond. The rope is a bit frayed but supports your weight. You estimate that the rope might break if the tension is 90 N greater than your weight. You grab the rope at a point 4.6 m from the limb and move back to swing out over the pond. Assume your weight to be 650 N (about 145 lb).**
   

•     [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 7, Problem 68.] Night after night, Lucy is tormented by nocturnal wailing from the house next door. One day she seizes a revolver, stalks to the neighbor's window with a crazed look in her eye, takes aim, and fires a 16 g bullet into her target: a 1.8 kg saxophone that rests on a frictionless surface. The bullet passes right through and emerges on the other side with a speed of 100 m/s, and the saxophone is given a speed of 4.1 m/s.**
   

•     [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 9 Problem 13.] A circular space station of radius 5.45 km is a long way from any star. Its rotational speed is controllable to some degree, and so the apparent gravity changes according to the tastes of those who make the decisions. Dave the Earthling puts in a request for artificial gravity of 9.8 m/s² at the circumference. His secret agenda is to give the Earthlings a home-gravity advantage in the upcoming interstellar basketball tournament. What angular speed would Dave's request require? Find the initial speed of the bullet.**
   

•        [Random Problem from Webassign] At the beginning of each term, a physics professor named Dr. Zeus shows the class his expectations of them through a demonstration that he calls "Lesson #1." He stands at the center of a turntable that can rotate without friction. He then takes a 1.9 kg globe of the earth and swings it around his head at the end of a 0.8 m chain. The class watches the world revolve around Dr. Zeus every 2.7 s. The professor and the platform have a moment of inertia of 0.5 kg · m².**
   

•         [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 14 Problem 91.] Tarzan is depressed again. He ties a vine to his ankle and swings upside-down with a period of 3.5 s as he contemplates his troubles. Cheetah the chimpanzee pushes him so that the amplitude remains constant. Tarzan's mass is 91 kg and his speed at the bottom of the swing is 1.6 m/s.**
  Ahhh, how could I have forgotten to add this the first time? Thanks to Justin for reminding me.
   

•         [Tipler 4th Edition, Chap 7 Problem 30.] Lou is trying to kill mice by swinging a clock of mass m attached to one end of a light (massless) stick 1.4m in length hanging on a nail in the wall (Figure 7-25). The clock end of the stick is free to rotate around its other end in a vertical circle.  Lou raises the clock until the stick is horizontal, and when mice peek their heads out from the hole to their den, he gives it an initial downward velocity v.  The clock misses a mouse and continues on its circular path with just enough energy to complete the circle and bonk Lou on the back of his head, to the sound of cheering mice.  (a) What was the value of v? (b) What was the clock's speed at the bottom of its swing?**
  Has this tool ever heard of a fucking mouse trap?  I'm sure he'd have less of a mess on his hands afterwards.  Way to go Lou.

I think the greatest thing about the Physics Program by far is the way they give tests.  All through the term, they have you doing homework problems of all sorts, so by the time the test comes around, you're thinking that you're prepared to do every type of problem they've taught you so far.  However, on the test, they give you problems similar to the ones that you're used to seeing, but they give you one less piece of information that would have made the thing remotely solvable without a miracle from God.  So you basically have no choice but to sit there and think about what information you can make up in order to make the problem do-able.  Even better than that is the way that they grade the tests.  You get like 8 problems on a test in Physics 1, which makes it impossible to get any decent grade unless you spent the last 7 years of your life memorizing every single piece of Physics you could get your hands on.  In Physics 2, the shaft gets even bigger (apparently they think that you've matured by now and your asshole can take an even greater raping).  Now the problems are worth about 16 points a piece, which means that if you fuck up on 2, you automatically get a D.  Also, there is no curve, drop test, or make up test, so what you get is what you're stuck with.  These fuckers are so ruthless that after the first test had an average of about a 55, they come to class the next day and give u a speech about how the average is 'somewhat low' so we should try to do better on the remaining tests.  That was it.  Talk about motivational speaking.


** Sources are from:
Tipler, Paul A.  Physics for Scientists and Engineers. New York City, New York:  W.H. Freeman and Company / Worth Publishers, 1999.

 

 

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