Comments on: Pause for a Glass of Wine

By: Pause for a Glass of Beer | Cosmic Variance

Pause for a Glass of Beer | Cosmic Variance — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:35:54 +0000

[...] The process of preparing exams for the freshman level is very different from the sort of exam preparation I spoke about earlier. Here, the students are still learning a lot of the language of expressing themselves coherently in properly formed mathematical statements, and still developing intuition for how the physical world works…. crucially they are learning (I hope) to abandon a lot of the dreadfully confusing phrases that pervade our language, which they hold onto, which then pollutes their physics….. And most importantly they are still learning to be confident about making the physics -and the processes I have taught them- work for them consistently, so it is a delicate time, and they’re easily confused at this stage. So one must prepare very straightforward questions, with extra clear instructions, and no clever sting in the tail. Sadly, I think we’ve been erring more on the side of caution in this area every year (no matter what institution I’ve taught at), and things get simpler and simpler to the point that it is difficult to go back. (But I understand that this is what is called “progress”, and so onwards and upwards we go…..) [...]

By: Crab Cakes | Cosmic Variance

Crab Cakes | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 02:30:10 +0000

[...] Sorry…. I’m hungry and so all I can think of (almost) is food. Before I see to that, and go see the movie “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, I thought I’d suggest the following. Since I mentioned a neutron star in a recent post (somewhere in the babble), why not pop over to Centauri Dreams and look at a larger version of the photo below, with commentary. It is a Hubble space telescope image of the Crab Nebula, (mostly a light fluffy souffle of hydrogen gas) which contains within it a neutron star, left over from a supernova explosion that probably happened in the year 1054. Yes, a neutron star is a bit (a bit) like a giant nucleus…. it is a large collection of neutrons bound together by gravity (any protons that were present find it preferable to each aabsorb an electron and become a neutron in this situation)…. Normally, neutrons live happily with protons in a bound state which is very small…. the nuclei that make up the atoms that make us up, and other ordinary matter. A single nucleus is about 10^(-15) meters across. Tiny. A nuetron star is about 15-20 km…so 10^4 meters across. Way bigger. [...]

By: Spacetime and black holes | Cosmic Variance

Spacetime and black holes | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:27:54 +0000

[...] As I type, the students in my Spacetime and Black Holes class are putting the finishing touches on their final exams. Unlike Clifford, I prefer to give take-home finals rather than in-class ones. Not a strong conviction, really; it’s just easier to think of interesting problems that can be worked out over a couple of hours than ones that can be done in half an hour or so. Here’s the final (pdf), if you’d like to take a whack at it. The colorful problem 4 was suggested by Ishai Ben-Dov, the TA; the terse calculational ones were mine. [...]

By: agm

agm — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 23:44:31 +0000

Or, I should say, the average student will be less able to demonstrate achieved competency.

By: agm

agm — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 23:43:27 +0000

I wonder if it’s a personal experience. Based on my time working for someone doing physics education on the side, and some pondering, and some total BS, I have firmly come to believe that exams are supposed to be pure assessment (and that the students should be told this). I don’t believe “exams are learning experiences” and that occasionally someone can put something extra together that makes things more wondrous during an exam, but that’s clearly the exception, not the rule. And if you design an exam to exact that from a student, many people will not do well.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 18:43:51 +0000

Back to the “necessary evil” of exams then. I agree with Clifford that it’s important to make the exam as fun as possible. One of the best I’ve taken was a take-home Cosmology exam that George Ellis gives in his 4th year cosmology course and I remember that I’d learnt more from that one exam than whole other courses even. It was great! Very structured and walked you through the entire thing; from writing down a metric to extracting measureable quantities from it and eventually why this partcular cosmological model can’t work. If one gives some (ok, probably a lot) of thought to it, exams can be quite as enjoyable (in hindsight obviously) as the rest of the course, I think.

By: Dissident

Dissident — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:43:13 +0000

Oh no! I’ve been hijacked! The Dissident of #10 is not the Dissident you’ve all come to love so dearly in months past. Grumble…

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:42:29 +0000

Dissident… My subject is always a little meandering. What’s new? I’m surprised my co-bloggers put up with me, frankly.

-cvj

By: Dissident

Dissident — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:39:21 +0000

are you sure it was just one glass of wine? your subject is a little meandering.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:37:32 +0000

Jack, thanks. It happened a while ago and I’m fine now. But that was not the subject of the post, really, just something mentioned in passing. It’s not appropriate to go into it any further here, save to say that scientists are regular people and so regular stuff happens to them…good and bad. I appreciate the comment.

Let’s get back to the subject now and leave the other alone!

Cheers,

-cvj