<p>I heard this course is extremely hard. Any recommendations on how to study for it? What review books/extra materials do you use?</p>
<p>I found it to be extremely easy and it was probably the course I put the least amount of effort and thought into. I also had an excellent professor, so your mileage may vary.</p>
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<p>uh, yeah, me too… (I’m assuming internet sarcasm)</p>
<p>I’m assuming this is for a junior/senior-level course–if so, check out the E&M book by Griffiths if it’s not the assigned text for your class, it’s a good book to ease you into the subject. Prepare for a lot of math–I’ve heard it said that “it’s the course where you actually learn vector calculus,” and I’d agree. Practice problems are very important.</p>
<p>I am being 100% serious. It was a very easy course and everyone I knew got an A or B with minimal effort. Homework assignments would frequently take ~30 minutes per week.</p>
<p>I guess you probably had an easy teacher. In my class there were only a couple A’s in a class of about 25. Out of the first 3 physics classes, E and M is definitely the hardest. I would just recommend getting a solution manual to your book or look on cramster.com to check your answers or get the solutions.</p>
<p>E&M is the most computationally difficult area in EE. Even the simplest cases may not even be analytically solvable, especially once you start talking about fields from simple antennas. However, most of the hard stuff isn’t covered in an undergrad class and so the best way to study would be to simply brush up on your vector calculus and really learn what curl and divergence and whatnot mean.</p>
<p>I find these responses extremely interesting!</p>
<p>My professor graded so that most people got C’s, and only a handful got A’s.</p>
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<p>Why so? If I remember correctly, you teach a physics course to engineers?</p>
<p>It was one of the harder Cmpe engineering classes I took. At Georgia Tech it’s known as Emag, Re-mag, and Three-mag (figure it out). I found microelectronic circuits to be more challenging though. Getting an A or B with minimal effort says a lot about your professor. You could pick up a book but chances are that your teacher isn’t going to teach out of one. Just study for it once you’re enrolled in the class.</p>
<p>The professor was absolutely excellent, probably the best (or at least amongst the best) I had at Purdue. You could tell he cared about teaching and put effort into it. My class was fortunate as I believe this professor does not teach the class very often and most people are stuck with not quite as good professors. Around graduation, a lot of us were reflecting back upon our time in school and many people said the class was one of their favorites and one where they learned the most.</p>
<p>I teach engineering E&M to EE majors. When I read that students spend 30 minutes per week or less on E&M homework, I laugh.</p>
<p>We were not assigned very many problems. At most an assignment might take a little over one hour. One assignment took 10 minutes.</p>
<p>DocT, don’t mind me asking, but where do you teach? Only if you can answer…</p>
<p>Curiosity :D</p>
<p>If your problem sets take that little amount of time, your course must be extremely watered down.</p>
<p>Besides the math which can present some difficulties for some students, I find that people (including me when I took the course more than 30 years ago), have difficulty understanding how to start solving the problem. Also the concept of a field is problematic for a lot of students. Most EE’s consider the course the most difficult that they ever had to take as undergraduates.</p>
<p>I’m not going to say where I teach but it is in CT.</p>
<p>DOCT IS A YALEEEEEE MAN.</p>
<p>Is this E&M referring to the equivalent AP course (AP Physics C E&M), or is it specific to EE?</p>
<p>If so, I honestly thought the two PhysC AP tests were a breeze, looking forward to pummeling college physics. I might retake in college to get a better understanding.</p>
<p>If not…DOCT IS A YALE MAN</p>
<p>“Is this E&M referring to the equivalent AP course (AP Physics C E&M), or is it specific to EE?”</p>
<p>No, its very different. First there is a significant difference between physics E & M and engineering E&M. Secondly, AP physics C is the same as calculus based freshman physics albeit somewhat watered down.</p>
<p>My kid took that AP course and I don’t remember seeing Maxwell’s equations written in differential form. By the way, although CT is a small state, there are other schools besides Yale.</p>
<p>I’m also curious, is this EE E&M? I am an engineering physics major so I took the physics E&M and was… glad to be done with it. Best I can suggest is to do the homework (don’t just copy!). The EE E&M class didn’t use Griffiths, but we did and he presented it all as very theoretical (as expected for the physics E&M). Roland H. Good’s “Classical Theory of Electric and Magnetic Fields” had some more practical aspects but is still a physics text. Your experience may differ depending on how EE E&M is, but from what I understand it’s still a trial.</p>
<p>I’d say the best thing to do is get together with people and grind through problems together. I can’t remember how many times I stayed up way too late trying to finish the assignments, but that was one class (or rather, 2 since it’s 2 quarters at my school) where doing the assignments was so important. I’ve done well at BS studying for many courses, but not E&M.</p>
<p>damn.</p>
<p>10char</p>
<p>As someone with a theoretical physics background, when I first taught engineering E&M, it was the first time I had ever seen integrals with numbers for limits.</p>
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<p>This might be a good idea. Physics I/II at any respectable university will be a step up from the AP exam. I myself scored a 5 on the mechanics portion of Physics C and I only produced answers to perhaps 2/3 of the test; I would hardly say that I understood physics well enough to get the equivalent of an A in a college course, which I believe is what TCB intends a 4 or 5 to be.</p>