by Rohan Kulkarni

last updated : June 17, 2020

I was the TA for this course in 2018 when Dr Kreisel took this course for the first time in Leipzig. Along with giving a seminar and a tutorial for the course, I also assisted him with formulating the assignments, giving suggestions on literature and, last but not least, formulating the exams.

Preparation for any exam generally has four parts, in my opinion:

1. Understand the assignments and the mock exam. (In the subsequent parts, I will mark the problems according to priorities)
2. Understand the content in the lectures relevant to assignments and mock exam
3. Combine these two points to predict what kind of computations/concepts are more likely to be asked. Find and solve more problems from the literature, etc
4. (If time prevails) Go over content that you feel might be important

Now, I will dissect these parts below!

Tip 1: Getting a good grade on the exam and understanding 100% of the lectures are different.

1. Assignments and mock exam

The goal of the assignments were as follows:

1. To complement the lectures
2. To show you what kind of computations are typically expected by a person who claims to understand "Electrodynamics."
3. Approximately one question on each of the problem sheets addressed a more mathematical question (The goal of these questions is to update your mathematical toolkit)

The goal of the mock exam:

• To show you what one must expect from an exam (The outline and the content)

Tip 2: In a fair exam, most of the major questions should be similar to something you have done in your assignments/mock. If a question comes straight from the lecture notes/literature, it will most likely be very easy. So, if you focused on the homework/mock and not on the lectures, don't get startled; read the question and tackle it one step at a time.

Assignments are expected to be done over a week, whereas an exam is a short affair of 180 minutes. It is quite obvious that everything cannot be tested in your exams. So, from my perspective, I will list the priorities of the questions that I would have focused on If I were giving the TP2 exam.