UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT

Physics 273

Department of Physics

Fall 2010

 

Homework Procedures

 

Collection

            Homework problems are due on the day announced in class WITH NO EXCEPTIONS, EXTENSIONS OR DELAYS.  You will turn in your solutions at the beginning of the period and, at that time, you will be handed solution sheets.

 

Collation

            Your name on a piece of your work is a guarantee that it is the best you can do as a professional.  Homework problems must be turned in on standard 8.5" x 11" sheets, white or yellow paper with or without rulings with or without punched holes.  Do not use the backs of old exams, scrap computer paper, pages ripped out of old notebooks or brown paper bags.  You may write on both sides if you wish to save paper, but one-sided sheets look neater.  Use a pencil preferably to a pen because you may have to erase errors.  Problems must be clearly marked and separated from each other.  Pages must be numbered consecutively and stapled at the top left corner.  Loose sheets will not be accepted.

 

Collaboration

            The assigned homework problems should take considerable time to solve, especially as the course progresses.  Do not be surprised or alarmed if you spend one or more hours just on one problem filling numerous sheets of scrap paper with your attempts at a solution.  This is par for the course.  Although it is desirable that you solve all problems by yourselves, this is not always practical in this course.  Collaboration with your fellow students is allowed and encouraged as a means of correcting possible flaws in one's thinking, as an aid to get one started and as a way of keep one going when one becomes stuck half way through a solution.  Limit your collaboration to general procedures about how to "set up" a problem outlining rather than exactly specifying the solution.  The course instructor will also be available within and outside his office hours to help students with homework questions.  Remember:  The final piece of work that you hand in must be your own, it must bear your personal stamp of thinking processes and you must understand completely what you have done, how you did it and why.

 

 

Grading

Each problem will receive a maximum of 4 points.

 

Points

Criteria

0

The problem is not attempted; the attempted solution or strategy is irrelevant.

1

The attempted solution or strategy is unclear or unjustified; some relevant work is shown; most parts in a multipart problem are missing.

2

The solution is carried out about half way; there are serious flaws in mathematical development or reasoning; about half the parts in a multipart problem are missing.

3

There are significant omissions and errors that prevent completion of the solution; one or more parts in a multipart problem are missing.

4

The solution is completely correct or mostly correct with perhaps one or two obviously insignificant errors, e.g. silly algebraic mistakes, forgetting to transfer a constant from one page to the other, etc.

Slacker Coupons

You will receive three and only three slacker coupons. Each coupon entitles you to turn in your homework late, but no later than 1:55 am on the next meeting day after it was due.  No homework will be accepted past that time, no matter how many coupons you have.  Attach slacker coupons to late homework to avoid getting a zero.  

Slacker coupons will not be accepted for the first and last homework sets;  these two must be turned in on time.

 

Redeem unused slacker coupons for extra credit at the end of the semester.  To your total homework score, I will add 2n % of that total where n = number of redeemed coupons (n > 0).