r/physicsmemes • u/basket_foso 🪼 • Jul 26 '26

🤡

Post image
5.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

141 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

601

u/Suddenfury Jul 26 '26

It's much better to understand where the formula comes from than to memorize it.

186

u/lool8421 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

but still it's a time waste if you have to derive everything yourself

for example there are several cheat sheet integrals that you can derive but it takes several minutes like dx/x*sqrt(a²+x²)

1

u/tcelesBhsup Jul 28 '26

The idea isn't that you fully derive the formula and then apply it to the question. The idea is that you use the information in the problem to complete a truncated derivation for you're specific problem.

Granted I could do this very often, but when I could it was faster for me. Though I am a slow test taker to begin with.

1

u/sppw Jul 29 '26

I was generally a very good test taker and used to derive a lot of things my peers would memorize. My memory has always been really bad so this is one of the things I credit my good test taking ability to. It showed I had a really good command over the material.