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This page describes some changes being made to PHYS211 for Winter quarter 2021, and outlines their motivations.
Changes to the course are motivated primarily by three factors.
- The Universities decision to open the quarter with two weeks of remote instruction.
- Addressing student concerns about expectations and feedback.
- Addressing TA concerns about setting expectations and grading workload.
The (proposed) schedule for winter quarter is shown below.
Here is a quick summary of the major elements of the course.
- Due to the reduced amount of time available for in lab work the number of experiments is reduced from 3 to 2 for the quarter.
- Each experiment is still divided into two 4-hour sessions. However these sessions are now one full week apart.
- Lab groups no longer have exclusive use of an apparatus for their experiment. There will be other groups working on the same apparatus on the days you are not scheduled to be in lab. This change was actually built into the original schedule for the course before the start of fall quarter. Here is how sharing of apparatus will work.
- When you come into the lab for the second day of an experiment you can no longer assume that it is in the state in which you left it on day one. The experiments running this quarter have been picked in part due to their suitability for this sort of interleaved operation.
- There is now more emphasis on keeping an appropriate lab notebook when working in the lab. There is now an immediate and practical need for maintaining a good lab notebook as you will need to refer to it in order to be able to pickup where you left off on day one. This is one of the purposes of lab notebooks in real research labs, documenting what you are doing in the lab as you are doing it, with sufficient detail that you can easily and accurately reconstruct what you were doing. As such your lab notebooks will no longer be graded, the penalty for not keeping a good lab notebook is that you will be making your own life as an experimentalist more difficult if you do not do so.
- Each experiment will now have its own logbook. This is just a lab notebook devoted to that specific experiment. The experiment logbook does not leave the lab, it remains in the room with the experiment at all times.
- Students are required to sign in to the logbook when they first arrive in lab, and sign out at the end of the day.
- You are expected to enter into this log book any information which the next group should know about. Notes on settings which were changed, unusual difficulties which were encountered and solutions which you implemented, problems with apparatus which came up.
- It is important that all of these notes include times and dates.
- You are encouraged to leave notes to future groups which may make their experience with the apparatus more productive.
- Things NOT to put in the logbook include; your data, answers to questions which you were expected to work out on your own, etc.
- Also, while we appreciate the occasional humorous comment please display an appropriate level of professionalism, comments such as “This lab sucks” are inappropriate and will be dealt with accordingly.
- Each experiment now requires two group meetings with the TA who grades the experiment. A Prep Meeting which occurs before you come to lab for the first day of a new experiment, and an Analysis Meeting to go over your analysis before you submit your final report. These meetings are expected to take place over Zoom and should last about an hour. The meetings are required and you will be graded on coming to the meeting prepared and participating in a meaningful way. The two meetings break down as follows.
- Prep Meeting. The purpose of this meeting is to make sure that you understand what the experiment is about in terms of both the phenomena being studied and the techniques being employed, and to make sure that you have a clear plan established for getting started when you come to lab. The wiki for each experiment will tell you what you are expected to know before coming to this meeting. It is on you to do the background research and reading necessary for this preparation. Much of the information you will need is provided in the wiki, but some things you may need to look up on your own. This is a real lab research skill. The meeting is also an opportunity for you to make sure that you are clear on what the TA is going to expect to see from your work in the lab.
- Analysis Meeting. After your second day in lab you will have 4 days to complete the full analysis of your data. This analysis will be submitted on the due date indicated in the schedule. Your TA will grade your analysis on its own merits according to the rubric in the experiment wiki. At the analysis meeting you will receive your graded analysis and have an opportunity to discuss it with the TA for the purpose of writing your final report for the experiment. We will provide more guidelines on the differences between the “analysis” and the “report” in a different document. In general terms the analysis is all of the number crunching, calculations, curve fitting, error propagation etc. which go into the report. It does not include discussion of results or descriptions of what you did in the lab, how you measured or estimated this or that value, etc. The report is more like what you handed in last quarter, it includes the results of your analysis, your final conclusions and a discussion of all the important factors that go into supporting your final conclusions. You are also expected to bring a detailed outline of how you plan to write up your final report to this meeting. You will be graded on being prepared for this meeting and participating in a meaningful manner.
- You will then have an additional two days after the analysis meeting to write your final report.
Note that these group meetings before and after doing an experiment are not entirely new for us. This is very similar to how we ran the remote version of the course last year. Instructors and TA's both felt that these meetings helped greatly to alleviate the concerns which we listed at the beginning of this document. The reasons we did not implement them for the fall quarter are several, but the main obstacle was scheduling the meetings around three experiments. Our desire to address your legitimate concerns about how the course is structured combined with the reduced amount of in-lab time for this quarter has convinced us to give this system a try.