March 24, 2008

Hi,

Thank you for doing the midterm survey for this course, including your written comments. I appreciate your input. Below are my responses to selected written comments, which I think are beneficial to share with you all.

Comments:  The clicker questions are very vague and don't really require a real understanding of the material. I can correctly answer the vast majority of clicker questions yet when it comes to homework I am usually completely lost.

Response: There are two types of clicker questions: the IQ type and the IT type.

è The purpose of IQ-questions is to check the overall understanding level of the class as the lecture progresses. It also takes the class attendance.

· It often gives me an instant feedback telling me whether I should spend more time on the topic or whether I should move on.

· In the case when significant fraction of the class gets the question wrong, I would like to give more explanation and ask the class to redo the question.

· Most of the clicker questions are taken from the PQ-library. I welcome criticisms and suggestions for improvements on any one of the questions, especially if you think it is vague and unclear to you. Each PQ-question is intended to test one or more principles.

à On working homework problems.

· Good understanding of the lecture, textbook examples and PQ-questions are usually adequate for a student to do well in homework.

· Let me remind you that the Friday 4-5pm informal session is intended as a safety-net to enable students to complete the homework of the week. If you have any difficulties in the homework set, please either be at the session or ask someone to be there to ask your questions for you.

à The IT questions are meant to check students’ mastery of the homework set just turned in. It is intended to encourage students to spend an extra effort to understand the HW problems.

Comments: It just seems to me like you spend more time deriving formulas on the board rather than applying them to situations and using the equations actively. While derivations serve their purpose, they provide absolutely no help in solving homework problems as we do them. I would suggest doing more in class problem solving.

Response: à The guidelines I used in selecting the lecture materials are two:

· 1) Provide a coherent presentation on the general physics principles of the course

· 2) We use homework to define the scope of material which students should have a working knowledge.

Some derivations are crucial in laying out logical thinking. The same logical thinking is needed in solving physics problems. Some derivations involve algebraic steps. If the text has work on the details, from now on to save time I will skip them and refer you to the textbook for details.

In the future, if you feel a certain derivation material could be skipped in the lecture, please call my attention. I welcome your input.

Comments: I feel the homework load is a bit too much at times. Also, I would prefer more math questions.

Response: à We are very interested in looking for places to cutdown the work load of the students without compromising the objectives of the course. If you have any suggestions on reducing the number of hw problems please call my attention to them.

Comments: I find the clicker questions and iqs very helpful, but I wish you didn't enforce an attendance policy because the room is so crowded and a lot of the people are very distracting

Response: à IT-test to encourage students to master the homework materials before the homework due time.

à On the IQ record: Our policy is sufficiently lenient, our past experience indicates that if a student attends the class and participates in the class on a regular basis, he/she should pass the 80% cutoff (after the designated number of drops are applied) without a problem. Furthermore, there is a safety-net of the “class-notes-audit” in our policy. See the Firstday Handout for details.

Comments: It would be helpful to have a practice test available for the student to work through on his or her own (with solutions provided) before the actual test. Often, when reviewing old homeworks and the clicker questions, it can feel like one is merely reviewing how to do that particular problem more so than fully achieving an understanding of the physics behind it.

Response: à To prepare for the exam, my recommendation is review

· lecture examples,

· textbook examples

· homework problems first.

Then test your understanding on PQ library problems. For future exams, we plan to give you selected problems at the back of the chapters for additional practice.

Comments: The material started with a lot of theory without understandinf what it really means in a real world situation or how it pertains to those who are not EE majors. Following this the class has gone into a vague understanding of circuitry and magnetic fields and electrical potentials that civil engineers like my self will not use, except in special circumstances. The class therefore appears to be a test of being able to comprehend and apply theory that does not pertain to engineering functions of the civil engineer. Just a test of adaptability rather than teaching useful function.

Response: à This is a course on general physics not a course in EE. This course teaches the fundamental laws of nature, more specifically in electricity and magnetism, optics and relativity. The physics content of the course is fairly standard throughout all universities in US.

· Take the EM part of the course as an example.

o We start from basic phenomena of E and M and explain how the fundamental laws behind electricity and magnetism work for the phenomena.

o We then go through some examples to illustrate the use of these fundamental laws.

o Students are to work on homework problems to understand these laws and principles better.

o More detailed applications and further complexities are beyond the scope of this course, which are left to the EE courses.

· Connection with the real world:

o In our textbook (by Ohanian and Markert), in the beginning of each chapter, some discussions are given to relate the introductory physics you are learning to real world situations. Students should read them on their own.

o Fung told me that he also attempts to relate the real world situation to what we are learning in some of TA sessions.

o My effort has been to help you to make logical connections among

§ fundamental laws and principles

§ basic physics phenomena,

§ the textbook examples and

§ the homework problems.

Thank you for your attention. I hope you will continue to try your best to do well in this course. Do email me or discuss with me your further comments, if any.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Chiu