UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT

Physics 274

Department of Physics

Spring 2010

 

Homework Procedures

 

Preparation and Presentation

Students will prepare and present the homework problems during the class time before the collection date.  Presentation days will be announced in advance but will not follow a regular schedule.  On preparation-presentation days all students are expected to be familiar with the problems and to have at least an outlined solution.  For each problem, two or three students will be randomly selected for the presentation.  The students' performance will be graded and count towards their in-class portion of their final grade.  Absent students who are called to present will receive a grade of zero for the day's in-class performance.

 

 

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.  You will have adequate notice before homework is due.  When notice is given, the material in the homework will have already been covered in lecture.

 

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.