Difficult. This subject had two lecturers teaching for each half of the semester and many people didint understand the second lecturer properly, the lectures ended up feeling really useless. The lab demonstrators are nice though I found the labs themselves very challenging (prob a skill issue tho icl). Meh Exam. I wouldnt do this subject again bro...... do urself a favour and avoid it if you can

Difficult yet also somehow simultaneously incredibly boring.

Don’t do it

Despite its unassuming name, Foundations of Physics is relatively quite difficult as it covers pretty much everything you may/should have learned in high school, on top of stuff that you would otherwise be learning in Physics 1. This is why if you do well enough you get to skip Physics 1 entirely and do Physics 2 (H2A), or Physics 2 Advanced (H1). My advice depends on your reason for joining. If you were doing this subject in order to pass the GAMSAT or qualify for another subject next semester, I would not recommend PHYC10009 as there are many alternate ways to learning the course material that are not as intense and demanding. If you are looking for a challenge as a newcomer to university or you have a particular interest in Physics without the experience, the subject gives you an opportunity to fully experience everything before you can decide whether to follow through with it. If you do end up deciding to take the subject, it is easy enough if you can dedicate a good amount of time to it (more than your other subjects). With the right resources, a lot of the knowledge becomes intuitive and you should leave the subject with a decent grasp of the way the world works. This subject is tailored for those who are dedicated to a good score, I'll outline that this is not in any measure a WAM booster or a passive subject. But if you can truly dedicate a considerable amount of time to it, the exam becomes a question of "how can I relate this information to these equations (given in the extensive formula sheet)?" I found that the most engaging ways to understand the content were the problem solving classes (where tutors are readily available to help you understand anything you have problems with) and finding appropriate videos on YouTube, and if I were to do any different (I got a low H1) I would make sure I asked my tutors as much as possible as soon as there was something I didn't understand about the new topic. The lecturers are good, Martin and Philip were particularly easy to understand and used useful demonstrations as an aide to the learning. So in conclusion, while Foundations of Physics is a conflictingly difficult subject (with a monstrously bad reputation), you'll find that if you can consistently pace yourself and use the resources at your disposal, you should almost certainly obtain a mark that you can wont be ashamed of - even if its significantly lower than your others. Best of luck with everything.

A slight warning to those taking the subject - many topics covered in a short amount of time, and so the amt of work for a H1 is much more than H1 in other subjects. Probably useful if sitting the GAMSAT, but entirely possible to cover the physics in GAMSAT on your own; I’m pretty sure only ~20% of one of the 3 sections of the GAMSAT is physics related. Personally, lecturers were of no use to me; their explanations were shallow and essentially impossible to understand unless you complete the relevant textbook chapters beforehand. In other words, lectures will only be beneficial if you do the textbook beforehand so that you know what they are talking about. PSC (prob solving) sheets very useful, and so were the PSC tutors; definitely attend your PSC classes but make sure you have done the sheets beforehand so you can ask questions during. Pracs are a nightmare if you don’t know how they work- to do well basically answer all the questions the night before yourself, so that you aren’t rushed during it. The practical instructors don’t mind if you have pre-answered your questions. Homework quizzes should be free marks if you keep up to date with content. Exam is definitely scaled up so don’t be discouraged if you can’t complete a lot of questions. To summarise, maximise your marks on the pracs and homework quizzes, and for the exam be familiar with all the topics (by doing PSCs, textbook questions, lecture questions)

Don't take this subject, the second half of it is not well taught at all. There's no point in paying tuition just to go on Youtube and try to figure things out yourself. Took this subject for gamsat and I wish I'd listened to the comments here. Please do yourself a favour and stay away, it's hard, not well taught and just outright impossible. Final is in 2 days and I still feel like I don't know anything. Avoid at all costs, unless this is your prerequisite I don't see any point in taking it. You don't need this subject even for gamsat, did gamsat this March and got 73 for the science section, you don't need this subject, just stay away. I haven't met anyone who's satisfied with this subject, and if they don't scale us the fail rate is gonna be pretty lol.

I managed a H2B in this subject and I strongly suggest that if you hated physics previously please do not take this subject hoping that it might change your mind. The lectures are structured very weirdly, and the lecturer, bless him as he seems to know a lot, wasn't very engaging. There are random questions that are distributed throughout the slides that he answers in the "friday lecture" but if he had answered the questions in the actual lectures they showed up in, it would have probably made so much more sense to me as pushing it to Friday completely disjointed the learning process. At the start, motion and forces was pretty straight forward but the difficulty of this subject definitely increased further. The weekly quizzes were fairly easy and were a good chance to test your knowledge but the "lab activities" and labs were terribly dry and weren't very engaging (on-campus) and trying to finish a decent lab report within the lab time was also quite difficult. Unless you need it for another subject I would suggest staying away. I know this subject also lures in a lot of future GAMSAT takers but if you are not mathematically/physics strong then this subject will be overwhelming and your WAM will take a hit.

Grade: P lmao. I was not a fan of this subject. Do not do unless you're absolutely sure you want to take it on/you have to for the GAMSAT. 85% of the time I did not understand what the lecturers were trying to explain. Whilst it's apparent that they are skilled in their fields, lecturing is certainly not one of them. I ended up just skimming through lectures and using youtube to learn the content (Organic Chemistry Tutor on youtube is a GOD). This helped me pass. I had a strong foundation in maths, so I found the first few weeks fairly okay with kinematics and mechanics, but after this, it was an inundation of concepts and formulas that I couldn't really fully understand nor keep track of. The pracs were generally straightforward, they're marked and run by a PhD student, so try to make a good impression on them. The activities weren't too bad as well. Every week there would be one 10 mark multiple choice quiz you'd need to do. The problem about this was that it was for the previous week's content, meaning that almost all of the cohort was perennially behind. You get three attempts on this quiz and the highest mark is kept. I'd say it definitely is possible to get full marks on all quizzes, but it'd be a bit time-consuming. Every week there'd be two online content lectures, one tutorial 'problem solving' class and one live lecture. In the live lecture, only examples and demos would be gone through. As someone else pointed out, during the online content lectures, the lecturers would show specific questions we were to go through in the live lecture which was super annoying as I would've preferred to go through them then and there. They also told us that we were expected to have knowledge of the week's content if we went to the live lecture, and as previously mentioned, the vast majority of us were one week behind always. As a result of this, most people did not go (or even watch) the live lectures. The problem solving class was okay, my tutor wasn't great, so attendance started waning after the first few weeks, but my friend had a great tutor and apparently a full class all semester. By halfway through the semester I had been sucked dry of initial curiosity into physics to be honest. I mostly got by on the formula sheet and plugging values in. That's all this subject was to me -- formulas. The exam was not good. I answered just a bit over half of the questions. It was online and made up of two parts: written and a canvas submission in the style of the weekly quizzes. Anyway, I'm glad I don't have to do that again! Good luck to future students, keep pushing through :)

Just graduated with a low H1. DO NOT TAKE THIS GODDAMN SUBJECT. The lecturers are nice enough, but they ARE NOT QUALIFIED TEACHERS BY ANY MEANS. They will not explain any content clearly, and everything is blown through so quickly, you never have time to appreciate or really understand any formulas or anything. By the end of the year, you'll have a book full of maybe 200 formulas or so, but no true understanding of how to use them, how they were discovered, or what they even mean. THIS SUBJECT IS TERRIBLE. The pracs are alright enough, I suppose, though the online ones were absolutely terrible. The tutorials are a complete waste of time and you'd be better off doing the questions in your own time. The textbook is around 1200 pages of absolute waffle, and it's so dense you don't even have the time or effort to read through it. This subject is a BUNCH OF BS. SERIOUSLY. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. For the love of god, DO NOT TAKE IT. I only got through by sheer luck and chance.

Grade: Low H1 Avoid at all costs. This subject is terrible. Lectures: Make no sense. While I'm sure the lecturer is an amazing physicist, I just, for the life of me, did not find him to be a good explainer. The main issue is that the digital format of the lectures severely reduce the demonstrations or body language that can be shown to students, which made lectures just really unapproachable. A major issue is the lack of worked examples. While the powerpoints contain exam questions, the issue is that these exam questions are never covered by the lecturer in the actual lecture, and are instead worked through in friday's "live lecture", which I found to be really annoying. This is because by the time this lecture is actually held/uploaded to the LMS, you have already kind of forgotten what happened in that question. Another big issue is that because the lecturer never works out questions during the lecture where they are teaching the content for the first time, it's really easy to have zero idea about what the concept is and how it can be applied in a problem. Thus, lectures basically consist of you being fed content that is never shown to be applied in a problem, and as a result it makes understanding some of the complicated or new concepts really difficult. Perhaps a useful modification to the lectures could instead have been to work through example questions at the time the content is taught, in order to actually better demonstrate the concepts. Note that I am not insinuating there is absolutely zero worked examples, there are a few, but they are simply just 'plug in the formula' type examples which anyone with zero understanding of the theory could solve. Overall, the lectures just don't really help to understand the theory. Practicals: There were 3 of them this semester, and I found them manageable. This is coming from someone who is absolutely terrible at practicals, and despises them. They basically consist of you with a team doing the experiment and noting down observations in your lab note books and drawing conclusions. The work in your lab book is then marked by your demonstrator. I found these difficult to keep up in terms of actually doing the experiment physically, but the lab work at least seemed to have been assessed fairly leniently. Make sure you read the lab notes about the experiment before your practical. Tutorials (Problem solving classes): These were the saving grace of this subject. I found my tutor Nick to be really good at explaining the concepts and he helped a lot with joining the admittedly large gaps in my understanding of physics. They basically consisted of us going through the questions on a worksheet with questions of mixed difficulties. Highly recommend attending these so you don't fall behind too much on the content. Weekly quizzes: These were alright for the most part, especially since they give 5 attempts. Some of the questions are hard but 10/10 on all of the quizzes is totally achievable. Activities: These were a complete dog move by the faculty. They gave us the first activity on the first week, and I didn't even realise it contributed towards our final grade. There are 3 of these, and the 1st and the second one I did find fairly difficult and did not do too hot on. The third one, about circuits, was easy, however. We do get a decent amount of time for these so it isn't terrible. Final thoughts: I found this subject to be very difficult. The hard to understand lectures made me resort to going through the textbook and doing the readings, so I can actually try understand whats happening. While this is fine and all, reading the textbook genuinely takes forever and as a result I was dedicating whole weekends just to do the textbook and corresponding questions so I can have a barebones understanding of the content. To make it worse, it really isn't clear what is examinable or not. The lectures cover heisenbergs uncertainty principle, but it is never explicitly mentioned if it is examinable, and there are other similar topics like this that we are left guessing about. There are also some concepts that they never teach us in lectures, but proceed to give us tutorial and exam questions on which I also found really frustrating. If you are coming from a zero physics background, expect to be throw in the deep end from day one. They cover so much in this course, and it is so easy to fall behind quickly if you do not put in the hours every week. I think I was spending upwards of 8 hours per week outside of lectures and quizzes on this subject each week to barely keep up. It was a frustrating grind just to keep my head above water and I do not want anyone else to go through that. I understand that a lot of biomedicine and science students who are aspiring doctors will want to take this course, and you probably will even if I discourage you from doing so because of the GAMSAT prep or whatever. All I want to tell you is that you should prepare for a very tough subject, and I highly recommend learning some of the concepts before you dive into it, namely newtons laws, basic mechanics (velocity, speed, acceleration, etc.) and circular motion. This will at least give you some time to ease into this subject for the first few weeks so you can be better prepared. They do occasionally throw GAMSAT questions at you in the lectures, but as mentioned before, these are rarely worked out on the spot and are instead referred to in the live lecture, which I found frustrating.