half of the assignments in the class are completely useless. their only purpose is to pad your grade. a better solution would be just to curve the class. my time spent on all these assignments would be better spent reviewing lecture and solving actual helpful HW problems. so many of the HW problems do NOT reinforce what we learned in class. useless

There are a lot of padding assignments and EC in this class so its fairly easy to get a good grade. But it's hard to learn anything from the 2nd half of this class. The lectures become overly complicated and dont prepare you for the HW. You basically have to teach yourself, but the textbook is also useless because its meant for review, not learning

Do not take - so many homework and active learnings (plus section requirements and problem presentation) means you'll be writing about trivial obvious problems step by step for hours. This is more of a handwriting class than a math class. So mind numbing.

DO NOT take Carlson if you can avoid her. PHYS 101 is one of the hardest classes, her unreasonable demands and poor teaching skills do NOTHING but make it worse. Not only are her lectures practically incoherent, on the off chance she actually lets you ask a question (raised my hand repeatedly, never called) she does nothing to explain the material.

She writes LIGHTNING fast, so fast she breaks like 2 pieces of chalk/lecture. Don't bother writing down all her proofs, just take the end results and know those. You will never be tested on the derivations of the formulas, only on applying them. just sit back and watch lecture and you will learn more than if you scribble everything down.

Professor Carlson is very personable and clear. The class is very tough and rigorous. Make sure to study any of the past midterm problems given by the TA. Also, she posts all her lecture notes online. I advise printing them out prior to class because she goes very fast and it is difficult to both listen (learn) and write at the same time.