PHYS 242LElectricity and Magnetism Laboratory

63% liked it48% easy62% useful

From 35 ratings and 8 comments on UW Flow. The most helpful comments, quoted as written, without names. Read them all on UW Flow.

• The labs are brutally long, both in person and when you write them up. They're also unnecessarily focussed on collecting/propogating uncertainties, which takes up the major portion of your time and it seems like they aren't meant to help you learn lab experience and instead follow a step by step formula to complete and grade you on analysis questions that don't really exercise your brain. Seems like kind of a waste and nothing new was learnt out of the experience.

  Aug 2023 · didn’t like it · 1 found this helpfulOn UW FlowRemove this

• Really cool labs. I really enjoyed learning about the circuits from the last two labs. You can definitely do well in this lab.

  Jul 2017 · liked it · 1 found this helpfulOn UW FlowRemove this

• It's as if the university is mocking me for enrolling when I did, because this course is getting cancelled and I STILL gotta take it. Also, most of the experiments like, sucked. They were either boring, or had your head crane so far backward you could probably see your ancestors. Don't really recommend it, unless you gotta, like my program does deciding its a good idea to give you two labs in a single term. I don't recommend that.
  Also. Why do they still make lab finals? It's genuinely so useless and sucks up SO much time from my other courses. Dude Icant.

  Aug 2025 · didn’t like itOn UW FlowRemove this

• You get graded pretty harshly on your lab reports with passive aggressive comments. You can put blood sweat and tears into the lab report and they'll give you a good 65-75. You'll probably spend (if you aren't technically quick with excel) about a full day if not more writing up the lab report properly. There is either always something else you could have put down or something you shouldn't have written in your report and you lose 20% (minimum) just for missing a point they were looking for.

  Jul 2025 · liked itOn UW FlowRemove this

• The labs varied significantly. Labs 1 and 2 were fun. Lab 3 I felt sort of lost, mostly because it wasn't the classic "measure data + regression" type of lab you are familiar with. Lab 4 and especially Lab 5 felt a bit irrelevant to what we were learning in PHYS242 and I don't particularly think what we learned from those labs will be useful in the future. Some of the grading was a bit harsh and some of the comments I got in my reports were confusing. The final project was very fun but I also believe the rules of how you should do your presentation were restrictive. Overall it was a pretty ok course, it has some potential (heh) but also has its problems. I feel bad giving this a "Dislike"…

  Aug 2023 · didn’t like itOn UW FlowRemove this