Man I hated Physics in college...
LOL!
You would have really hated the written portion of the comprehensive exam for the masters at Stephen F. Austin State then.
35 problems that were humdingers. Had to get 21 of them totally right to get your M.Sc. in Physics. The fun part when I was there was that the written had not been changed in something like 30 years. No SI units, everything was in Customary English Units (ECUs). Physics students in the early and mid ‘60s normally learned to work in these units as well as in metric units. By 1975 almost all the physics text had gone totally to SI units. Yet the written was still in ECUs. This totally drove grad-students that took it for the first time up the wall. By the mid-‘80s the written had gained legendary status as being a total #&%@*. Most of the students taking the written in the ‘80s scored low but enough to pass.
I had gone to McLennan Community College in Waco, and had taken three courses under a retired Aggie EE named Bill Alexander. There was not a problem on his test that used ANY metric units. Everything was in ECUs. His philosophy was: “Monkeys can do problems in SI units. If you’re going to be an engineer you must learn how to deal with traditional units.” Little did I know that his insistence on learning to do problems in ECUs would totally save my bacon on the written. The ECUs didn’t phase me in the least.
I think Dr. Grubel said I was the first grad-student in 20 years to have worked the problems in ECUs rather than converting the ECUs into SI units, working the problems, and then converting the final answers back into ECUs. I was one of the few students to work all the problems on the written in the past dozen years. This was only because I forewent all the unit conversion gymnastics.
TFP
