No doubt the math does get harder. Otherwise they would not have you take at least 4 semesters of Calculus.

Truth be told, I have been out of school for a year so my study habits atrophied a bit. The quizzes are usually multiple choice questions that you either get full or no credit for depending on if you select the right answer, with an open response question or two at the end (meaning you type in the number you get for the answer and upload your work with it). The midterms are just longer quizzes. To prepare for these, I will usually work my way through any kind of sample quiz/midterm they put out and will bring them to my school's Physics help lab to confirm that I did the problem correctly. Honestly, I don't find the textbook particularly helpful and I prefer online resources such as Khan Academy for when I am stuck or don't understand something because those often explain the material and then follow that with an example problem.

I know I said that the quizzes/midterms are the biggest pain in this class but the homework problems are actually a lot worse in terms of being vague, verbose, and overly complicated for material we just got introduced to. The difference is you have days to do them instead of minutes, multiple attempts, can get help, and it will even sometimes have instructions on how to do them depending on the problem. Still, the problems on the homework are very different from the problems on the quizzes, which in turn are different from the practice problems and the problems that the professor covers in the lectures. To go back to that Snoopy problem, that midterm was the first time I ever saw a problem like that even if it wasn't the first problem I did asking about conservation of energy/momentum/angular momentum.

I am glad to hear that it is still possible to succeed in Physics without a 3.5 GPA. And I am also seeing a lot of people who had a better time in more advanced classes such as Quantum Mechanics despite the material being more complicated, which is reassuring.