Dynamics Announcements

Final is on Tuesday, Dec. 20 at 2pm in Merrill 204. You can bring 3 sheets of notes, calculator, and writing implement. I will provide the exam and the blue book. Good luck!

Exam 3 grades are posted in the gradebook. Score is listed in points out of 150. Your exam will be passed back on Monday after break during class.

The essay questions for exam 3 are listed below. You may bring a solution with you to the exam on Wed. night. If you forget you will be able to answer the essays during the exam.

Happy Halloween! No class tomorrow. I had to head for the hills (aka Cambridge) after a branch punctured the roof of my house and the power went out. No homework this week, please read Ch. 13 on Hamiltonians.

Due to low attendance I am canceling the problem session on Tuesdays. Most of you just stop by my office in the afternoon. If there is a better time that works let me know and I will reinstate it. :) In any event there is a faculty meeting tomorrow so I won't be able to meet with anyone in the evening.

I have graded the exam and passed back both the exam and the solutions. Please look over your grade in the gradebook, as I recorded these at 2 am and so there may be mistakes. The exam is out of 135 points, but your grade in the gradebook has been renormalized to 150 points (i.e. take your score divide by 135 to get the percentage and then multiply by 150 to get the grade in the gradebook). For those that have emailed me or talked to me after class I have already updated your score. Please let me know of any changes as soon as possible.

I have included the histogram of student scores. The mean is a 71% with a width of 8%, and 9 out of 15 students scored above a 70%.

I am very happy with the results of this exam. You did very well! I am also happy with the length of the exam given the amount of topics we covered in the class. I am only not happy about one aspect - that there were many small mistakes that could have been avoided with more careful inspection. So in the future the format of the exam will be the same, but I will give you an extra hour to work on the problems. Please note that the next midterm will be 3 hours long; the final will remain unchanged at 3 hours long.

I made a whole slew of announcements today in class. To make sure you got them all, I have summarized them below.

1) Homework on Ch. 6 will now be due on Oct. 19 (Wed. at midnight). This should allow you more time to study for the exam.

2) Exam on Oct. 12 (Wed. 7-9pm) in Merrill 211. The exam will be 2 hours long and will be the same format as the intro mechanics exam. There will be 5 math problems, 5 multiple choice problems, and 3 essays questions of which only your best essay will be graded. The 3 essay questions will be given out before the exam and you may complete them at home and bring them in with you to the exam. You will also be allowed to use one 8.5X11 inch sheet of notes during the exam. I will not provide equations.

3) Please email me with any questions about the material from Ch. 1-5 by Friday. I will address these questions during Friday's lecture. After reviewing these questions I will start to discuss Ch. 6.

I have placed the solutions to the homework problems on reserve at the science library. Do not take the solutions out of the library and do not photocopy or scan the solutions. You will notice that there are solutions to other problems besides the assigned problems. You can take it upon yourself to do these problems in preparation for the exam or as study problems. O

Ultimately, you will want a record of the solutions. You should correct your own homework sets and these should serve as your record. Again my goal is to have everyone do and understand every problem.

Hi Class!

I wanted to contact you before the semester starts about our upcoming advanced mechanics course. I am very excited to teach this class this semester. In fact I wheeled and dealed with the other professors for this course because I wanted to teach the junior majors - having met most of you previously - and because mechanics is just so darn useful. During the course you can expect to work hard, play hard, and hopefully learn something too.

I've attached the syllabus to this announcement so you can look through it. Pay attention to the book for the course (John Taylor's Classical Mechanics); you'll want to pick that up. In addition, I am going to give a take home exam the first week of class. Ugh! I know. What evil professor does this? Well you can blame Kati McKinnon who really put the idea into my head after she said that the other professors spent too much time reviewing material. So we will review intro mechanics the first week of class and take an exam. Then we will speed through ch. 1-5 so that we can get to the meat of the course in ch. 6-7 and 13. As an incentive to WANT to take the exam, I will give you a 100% on it as long as you get it 80% correct. I will explain more the first day of class. However, for those that want to get a head start and are not too bogged down with parties I would crack open the ol' intro mechanics text, dust off the pages, and dig in.