Historical instructor

PETER TIMBIE

Adjusted rating
RMP difficulty
captured reviews
About this rating

Raw average: 2.71/5 from 73 quality ratings. The adjusted rating blends this with the UW review average (3.66/5), weighted as 20 additional ratings. Smaller samples stay closer to that average. Each captured review is counted once in the prior; this does not correct who chooses to leave a review.

RMP profile ↗ · All captured review dates; profile matched by name.

What students say

Original student reviews · all captured dates

PHYS104 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 4/5
Peter Timbie is an okay professor but honestly the entire structure of the course sucks. You basically have to teach yourself everything before lecture and only do examples in lecture. Even though Timbie is ok, it's offset by the other 2 professors because all 3 taught 104 together and switched off each week. Highly recommend going to TAs for help.
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PHYS104 · course not matched
Quality 5/5Difficulty 4/5
He is the best physics professor at UW-Madison (which is not a hard challenge). He is great at explaining concepts and he seems like an amazing grandpa type.
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PHY321 · course not matched
Quality 5/5Difficulty 3/5
Nice guy. Funny jokes. Lectures do get boring however as he only teaches the bare basics of topics while the homeworks are much harder.
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PHYSICS 321
Quality 2/5Difficulty 4/5
Dr. Timbie obviously cares about his students, but he is an extremely poor lecturer. He tends to be disorganized, and his handwriting was literally unreadable. I don't feel that I learned much from Dr. Timbie, and I mostly had to figure things out from the (also poor) textbook.
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PHY207 · course not matched
Quality 5/5Difficulty 3/5
He is very nice. I enjoy his lectures, and he is super kind and respectful
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PHY207 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 3/5
Labs are tedious. Lectures are boring. He goes over stuff like students have known everything and skips slides for no reason.
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Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.

Classes with PETER TIMBIE

No teaching recorded in Fall 2026.

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Recorded teaching history

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Browse recorded courses
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Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.

Instructor identity & provenance
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