An exercise which may improve your study habit

From time to time, it is a good idea for a student to self-evaluate his/her study habit, especially after a Test. You have just had your first. If you did not do well in this Test, I invite you to go through the following exercise to evaluate your study-habit in preparing for an exam. I suggested this last term. I know at least several cases where students benefitted from doing this exercise.

Here is a rough correspondence between problems in Test 1, and related problems in you homework and in the iq-questions:

unif. charged circular arc	2875-2876, 2893-2895	23.3.2, 23.5.1
unif. charged sphere	3262-3164	24.3.2, 25.5.2
sphere within a shell	3059-3062, 3077-3080, 3172-3173	24.3.1,24.3.5
spherical capacitor	3288-3291	25.6.2, 26.2.2
fields near charged plates	3056-3058	24.4.6, 24.4.7
four charges plus one	2875-2876, 3117-3119, 3137-3138	23.3.2, 25.3.3

This is what you can do. For each Test problem which you did not do well, study those related problems in the homework and in the IQs listed above. Make sure you understand the physics. Then you proceed to redo the Test problem. In this manner, you go through all the problems which you did not do well in Test 1. Let me divide the outcomes into two categories

• Category 1: You are able to do all the problems in Test 1 in the manner described above. This indicates that you have the potential to do well in this course. In fact, you could have done well in Test 1, should you have studied homework sets and IQ questions in the manner which you did for this exercise. Just to look ahead, for the preparation of the next exam, you may consider using the following approach. Study one chapter at a time. For each chapter, go through the textbook examples, together with the IQs and the homework. Remember you should study the IQs and the HW in the same manner as you did in this exercise.
• Category 2. After studying the corresponding HW problem(s) and the IQ question(s), you still are unable to complete Test 1. This indicates that you have a deeper problem. You must be more proactively seeking for help. For example, come talk to me. Your should bring your work together with the corresponding IQs, homework sets and the Test. We need to identify the source of your difficulty.