A review of UBC's physics courses

As I enter my final semester of university, I have the chance to reflect on the time I've spent here at UBC. In doing so, I've realized that soon my brain will no longer revolve around all-things-student, and my college memories will begin to blur. So, while all the information is still (pseudo) fresh, I need to create a proper digest of my physics degree. Honouring this theme, let's do this in the nerdiest and most physics-y way possible: with a tierlist.

Of course, every good tierlist needs a rubric. Here are things I do consider for each ranking:

1. Usefulness. How useful is the course for post-school life?
2. Execution. Given what the course sets out to do, how well does it accomplish this?
3. Organization. Are the topic and quantity of the course content reasonable?

Let me lead with a forewarning; these are things I absolutely do not consider for each ranking:

1. Professor. Teaching staff often changes, and it is not my intention to use this platform to provide performance reviews of faculty.
2. Grades. Including this metric skews the rankings to not properly reflect the true learning takeaways of a course.

Here's the list¹:

• S: ["PHYS 410", "MATH 400", "PHYS 449", "PHYS 402", "PHYS 409", "MATH 317"]
• A: ["PHYS 403", "PHYS 210", "PHYS 309", "PHYS 216", "SCIE 001", "MATH 316"]
• B: ["PHYS 401", "PHYS 229", "PHYS 474", "MATH 221", "MATH 215"]
• C: ["PHYS 407", "PHYS 306", "MATH 300", "MATH 318"]
• D: ["PHYS 200", "PHYS 203", "MATH 200", "PHYS 301"]
• F: ["BIOL 140", "PHYS 219", "PHYS 304"]

¹ The astute reader will note the inclusion of some non-physics courses in this list. All math courses listed are required for an honours physics degree. First-year science courses (here SCIE 001 and BIOL 140) were also included because the physics specialization does not begin until second year.