Physics 4324—Electromagnetism II
Midterm survey
NB: some comments are paraphrased
1. Pace of class:
Too fast: 3
Too slow: 0 Just right: 12
Selected comments: “Fast, but ok.” “ Fine for the amount of material we need to
cover”; “adequate time spent placing new material in context, still moving forward”;
“pace of class never runs beyond the rate at which I can gather it, and never goes too
slowly as to bore or make attendance unnecessary”; “personally I would like to spend
more time on each subject”; “review at beginning of class helps to ‘soften the blow’”;
“trying to cover a lot of material, but this is physics and 4000 level class”; “seems
comfortable”.
2. Test:
Selected comments: “only complaint for class would be amount of time we have for
exams—I wish we had 2 hrs”; “fair exam”; “time was a factor; easier exam/less
questions? Would be nice if questions were closer to HW problems”; “even though
questions were unseen before, surprisingly fair and doable for someone with a good
grasp of the topics”; “resolution of the grade scale wasn’t high enough”; ”fair so
far”; ”well-balanced, time management may be small concern”; “don’t like 1hr
exams”; “preparation helps”; “good that drops are allowed”;”tough but formula sheet
helps”; “choice of 3 of 4 questions was as stressful as it was helpful”; “very long”;
“way more difficult than what we have been learning”; “good level but grad student
grades too harshly”; “too long, should be more like HW problems”.
3. Homework:
Selected comments: “like the HW, feel it goes in hand with the lectures”; “fair, can
be vague at times but tries to clarify by email”; “recent HW has felt disconnected
from lectures, i.e. transmission line problem was assigned but wave propagation in
periodic circuits was not covered”; “good amount”; “fair, fairly long, occaisionally
do not sync with lectures”;”one extra thought provoking/time consuming problem—
pretty good philosophy”; “when 2 or more such problems show up, gets a little
excessive”;”about right”;”HW6 was tedious”; “reasonable”; “sometimes questions
seem unrelated to class”; “sometimes tendency to focus on material taught right
before or when HW is due”.
4. Lecture/Example/Discussion balance
Selected comments: “I really llike the demos”;”perfect”;”examples in class are too
easy, sometimes trivially easy”;”more worked examples after learning new
materials”;”examples and demos are used exactly when I need a break from
lecture”;”wonderful”;”perfect”; “I like the inclusion of numerical problems”; “
5. Other comments:
“closer integration of lecture, examples, and HW”; “overall I enjoy the course”; “I
like extra credit project, allows me to put my personality into the course.”; “maybe
have an out of class review discussion”; “grading system seems very fair”.
RESPONSES:
Thanks for your open comments, praise and criticism. You can see from the diversity
of the comments that it won’t be possible to please everyone. However there were
some strong themes which seemed to me to come through:
a) Class pace is about right. I will stick to it. Apologies to those in the tails of the
distribution. You can make better use of office hours for more help/more
stimulation…
b) Some of you prefer to have more time for the tests, and that means evening exams.
I have done this in the past and always found it to be a headache because
whatever day is chosen there are always a few students who have a conflict; this
then involves my writing a makeup test, issues of fairness, etc. I polled the class
last year and half didn’t like evening exams at all. I’ll try to make sure that the
number of questions on the next hour test is reasonable. The final will, of course,
be two hours. Some want test closer to HW; I’ll try to adapt at least one problem
on next test from HW. However note that there are constraints on what I can ask
on a test; most HW problems are designed to make you think deeply, and
therefore require more time than a test would allow.
c) Homework: I will occasionally assign problems like the transmission line
problem which are not directly related to the course material, but are designed to
show you that what you are learning has connections to other applications. That
problem involved only concepts and equations from elementary E&M. I do
apologize for the week or so that the HW was out of sync with the lectures, & will
try to stay on top of that. Otherwise, most people seemed ok with most aspects of
HW.
d) Balance: there is a general and understandable appreciation of demos and
examples to break up lectures. Warning: the upcoming material does not lend
itself so well to demos, but I will try to find more examples to substitute. I know
that an hour of derivations can be deadly.