Each year I teach some of a fourth year undergraduate course PHYS4030 Condensed Matter Physics which is based on Ashcroft and Mermin. Back in 2012 I started the course by giving the students a Pre-test, which tests some basic knowledge and skills. I posted the test and some reasons why I thought that it was a particularly valuable exercise.
Yesterday I gave the test for the fifth time. Some of the results were a bit disturbing; more than half the 20 students scored less than 60 per cent. Some struggled to do basic calculus, sketch graphs, or remember Schrodinger's time-independent equation or that the heat capacity is the temperature derivative of the internal energy, ...
I said before that the test is a useful wake-up call for the students. However, I realised it is also a wake-up call for me. I really have some idea of what the students can do and can't do, what they struggle with. I can't just blissfully hope they know more than they actually do. There are also some basic points and skills I will have to keep coming back to.
I welcome comments on the test and my observations. Is it reasonable to expect students to score greater than 60 per cent on such a test?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Emergence and protein folding
Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
-
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
I guess it's worth remembering that a great deal of students tend to forget this sort of content over the break, hopefully with a little bit of encouragement and some reminders they'll be back in fighting form! (many of my students forget things as simple as linear algebra over the summer holidays)
ReplyDeleteAll the best for the coming semester!
Thanks for the comment. I agree that this does happen. Then the test is a good reminder to brush up and start remembering.
Delete