TABLE OF CONTENTS
The lecture material will follow the text fairly closely, and many of the assignments will be drawn from the text. Hence it is a good idea for you to purchase the text or have regular access to it. In this course we will cover most of the chapters on electricity and magnetism and wave optics. It is highly recommended that students read the relevant chapter ahead of time. There will also be assignments that will not be from the book. Students are expected to have a working knowledge of calculus.
Useful information including assignments for this course are available at the Courseweb site for this course. You can log on to this site by going to http://courseweb.pitt.edu and typing your university unix user name and password. This site can also be used for discussion forums related to this course in which your instructor and fellow classmates can participate.
Homework is an integral part of learning the material of this course. Homework will be assigned each Tuesday. Homework and recitation quizzes on the material covered in the class in a particular week will be due the FOLLOWING week. It is your responsibility to come to class to find out what was covered in a particular week so that you can prepare for homework and quizzes for the following week. The homework will be collected in the recitation and it will only be checked for completeness. 5% of the course grade will be determined by your performance on homework that is turned in by you. The solutions will be posted on the courseweb in the course document folder same week by Thursday evening (after all recitations are over). You are strongly encouraged to work on the questions/problems yourself before you get help. Often there will be self-help tutorials on the courseweb in course document folder related to the material covered in a particular week. It is your interest to work on the tutorial each week. The tutorial takes a quantitative problem and breaks it into conceptual questions and provides guidance to help you understand the concepts. There will be a quiz in the recitation every week based upon the homework questions/problems/tutorial assigned the previous week. The questions/problems in the recitation quiz will not be exactly the same as homework/tutorial problems but will be based upon the same principles. If you understand the reasoning/concept behind the homework/tutorial questions/problems you should have no difficulty doing well on the quiz. However, if you try to memorize homework/tutorial problems, you will not do well on the recitation quizzes. Sometimes in the recitation, the quiz may involve group problem solving. The group problems will pertain to some real life situation related to the homework for that week. These context-rich (real life) problems will be more challenging and stimulating than the textbook problems and will help you appeciate how physics applies in everyday situations. They will also teach you good problem solving strategy which includes planning, implementation, and evaluation. The group work will count as a quiz and will be graded exactly as an individual quiz (all the group members present will receive the same score for the group work). Quiz performance will count approximately 15% in determining the final grade.
Due to the importance of the homework in helping you learn and apply the conceptual matter under discussion, and to prepare for examinations, you are highly encouraged to try as many of the assigned problems/questions/tutorial as possible before they are discussed and solutions presented. The in-term examinations will involve problem solving to demonstrate mastery of the material, and the best preparation will be a thorough understanding of the assigned problems and questions.
Since the goal of this course is to develop your reasoning and problem solving skills, I expect you to solve physics problems employing effective problem solving strategies, which includes analysis, planning, implementation and reflection rather than solving the problems haphazardly. I will model this method in class, and it will be necessary to follow this method to receive any partial credit in weekly quizzes and exams.
To ensure that you are understanding the underlying concepts covered during the lecture, I will interrupt the class several times during each lecture to pose a conceptual question. You will be asked first to think about the question by yourself, and later discuss it with your neighbor. Then, I will poll the class using the personal response system to see how many of you obtained the correct answer. Each student will be assigned a personal response system transmitter. Please put your backpacks in your seats before picking up YOUR transmitter from the bins. At the end of the class, please return the transmitter to the correct bin number. The class participation through these transmitters count for 5% of your course grade. If you get the response correct after discussion with your peers, you will get 100%. If you do not get the response correct after discussion with your peers, but participated in all questions that were asked, you will still get 80%. There will be ABSOLUTELY no makeup for class-participation points lost due to absences from class due to any reason.
There will be three midterm exams and a two hour cumulative final examination. The final examination time can be found from registrar's office. The midterm exams are tentatively expected to fall on (Note: The dates for the midterms are only tentative and can be changed any time based upon the instructor's discretion.):
The lowest performance of the three in-term exams will be dropped. The course grade is expected to be determined by two in-term exam grades (15% each), the final exam (35%), class participation (5%) and the recitation grade (20% for homework/quizzes and 10% for PEC homework). All disputes about homework or exam or quiz grades must be resolved with the TA and instructor within a week from the time this material was returned to the class. Even if an individual student did not pick up their homework or exam or quiz for a while, this one week grace period for resolving the grading disputes is from the date these graded tasks are returned to the class (and not from the time an individual student picked it from the TA). In practice the recitation performance often determines which side of a borderline (e.g., A to B or C- to D) the final grade will fall on. There will be absolutely no make-up midterm examination. Also, the midterm or final exam be not be given ahead of time so please plan to be there for the exams. If you have any disability and must take the exam in the disability resource center, please let me know as soon as you can.