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This page describes some changes being made to PHYS 211 for Winter Quarter 2022 and outlines their motivations.
Changes to the course are motivated primarily by the following three factors:
- The University's decision to start the quarter with two weeks of remote instruction.
- A need to address student concerns about expectations and feedback.
- A need to address TA concerns about setting expectations and the 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 in-between days scheduled in the lab. Here is how sharing of apparatus will work:
- When a student comes into the lab for the second day of an experiment, they can no longer assume that the apparatus is in the state in which it was left on Day 1. (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 an immediate and practical need for maintaining a good lab notebook as students will need to refer to it in order to be able to pickup where they left off on Day 1. 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, individual lab notebooks will no longer be graded, with the penalty for not keeping a good lab notebook that a student will be making their own life as an experimentalist more difficult.
- 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.
- Students are expected to enter into this log book any information which the next group should know about. This may include, for example, notes on settings which were changed, unusual difficulties which were encountered (and solutions which were implemented), or problems with apparatus which came up. It is important that all of these notes include times and dates.
- Students 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 the following: student data, answers to questions which students are expected to work out on your own, etc.
- Also, while we appreciate the occasional humorous comment, students must 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 a group comes to lab for the first day of a new experiment and a Post Meeting to go over the analysis before students submit their final report. These meetings are expected to take place over Zoom and should last about an hour. The meetings are required and students will be graded based 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 students understand what the experiment is about (in terms of both the phenomena being studied and the techniques being employed), and to make sure that students have a clear plan established for getting started when they come to lab. The Wiki for each experiment provides much of what students are expected to know before coming to this meeting, but students may need to look up some additional things. It is up to individual students to do the background research and reading necessary for this preparation. (This is a real lab research skill.) The meeting is also an opportunity for students to make sure that they are clear on what the TA expects to see from work in the lab.
- Post Meeting: After the second day in lab, students will have 4 days to complete the full analysis of the data. This analysis will be submitted on the due date indicated in the schedule. The TA will grade the analysis on its own merits according to the rubric in the experiment wiki. At the post meeting, students will receive the 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, plotting, curve fitting, error propagation, etc; it does not need to include specific discussion of results, descriptions of what was done in the lab, etc. The report is more like what was submitted last quarter in that it includes the results of the analysis, final conclusions, and a discussion of all the important factors that go into supporting those final conclusions. Students are expected to bring a detailed outline of how they plan to write the final report to this meeting. Students will be graded on being prepared for this meeting and participating in a meaningful manner.
- Students will then have an additional two days after the post meeting to write the final report.
Note that these group meetings before and after doing an experiment are not entirely new for PHYS 211. This format is very similar to how the remote version of PHYS 211 ran in 2020-2021. Instructors and TAs felt that these meetings helped greatly to alleviate both the TA and student concerns listed at the top of this page. The reasons we did not implement them this past Autumn Quarter are several, but the main obstacle was scheduling the meetings around three experiments. Our desire to address student's legitimate concerns about how the course is structured combined with the reduced amount of in-lab time for this quarter have convinced us to give this system a try.