Final Exam Review

Next Saturday (26 April), I will offer a final exam review session, from 3:30-6pm in Shelby 107. Note the non-standard day, time, room, and building.

I will be around during that whole period to answer questions and review material, you can come and go as you please - it is not really intended that you stay the whole time. I will prepare some example problems to work through, come with your own specific questions and I will try to answer them.

Also, there will probably be video games.

Lab for Thurs 17 April

Today, we will measure Planck's constant.

Open source textbooks in the news

I'm not the only crazy one. Best quote:

“The world doesn’t need another linear algebra textbook on the market — it needs a free one.” - Rob Beezer, a professor of math and computer science at the University of Puget Sound.

Pretty much how I feel about the situation.

MCAT is impending ...

So. I hear many of you have a big nasty test coming up.

Come with sample MCAT problems (ideally with solutions as well, if you have them) and I will solve a few in class on Thursday. I'll bring a couple of my own.

Otherwise, the agenda for Thursday is to solve quantum & atomic physics problems, i.e., the homework set posted yesterday. I think in this case it is easier to understand by just working through some "practical" examples, rather than pontificating too long on how weird it all is ...

After all that, we will measure Planck's constant. Exciting, huh?

This one goes to 11.

Your next homework is out. We'll do plenty of these in class during the week.

Lab and content for Thurs 10 April

Here is a lab for today's class, a last bit of optics before we move on.

Our next topic will be quantum physics. I do not, as yet, have notes for this topic. Don't fear: if you've had a chemistry course or two, I doubt you will need any. I'll discuss this more in class.

After about a week of quantum physics, we are on to atomic physics, and finally we will end with nuclear physics. Time flies, we are nearly done.

Exam II scores and distribution.

Well, well, you are more clever than I thought you were :-)

The class average - including the bonus question - was 88.0%, with a standard deviation of 11.7.

Without the bonus question, those numbers are 83.6% and 11.3, respectively. I consider this to be a better measure of how you all did (the bonus question is just free points, basically). Well done, many of you raised your grade significantly. The bonus point, on average, added 2.7 points to your score ... for what basically required you to remember a demo I did in class, or read the notes.

Here are some pretty plots to tide you over until I pass back your individual exams ... tomorrow in class. Click for a larger image.


Some comments: numbers 4 and 8 were not popular, nor were the scores very high. For the former, I blame this on not covering the quantitative aspects of filters enough. For the latter ... it was simply a tricky problem. Number 2 also had a slightly lower average. Much of that was due to not realizing you had to add the field from both wires (HINT for homework), but the problem did involve several different steps.

Sources of some of the problems:

2 - related to examples in the notes, loosely
3 - nearly identical to example in the notes, ch. 7
4 - essentially identical to a HW 8 #2
5 - you hadn't seen an LC filter before ... good work.
6 - related to HW 9 and notes problems
7 - just geometry, nothing more
8 - a question on the first lenses lab ...