PHYSICS 1370
Quantum Mechanics I

TERM 07-1 (Fall 2007)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Course Description

The lecture material will more or less follow the text, 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. There may also be assignments from outside the book on relevant material. The first semester of the course will cover Chapters 1-4.

Courseweb

Useful information including assignments for this course are available at the courseinfo site for this course. You can access this site by going to http://courseweb.pitt.edu and typing your university unix account username and password. This site can also be used for discussion forums related to this course in which your fellow classmates and instructor can participate.

Homework

Confucius has summarized the learning process well: ``I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand". Homework is an integral part of learning the material of this course. Homework will be assigned each week on Monday and collected next week on Wednesday. You are strongly encouraged to discuss the homework problems with each other after you have tried them to the best of your ability because you can learn a lot from each other. The solutions for the homework will be posted on courseweb the following week.

Grading Scheme

There will be two mid-term exams and one comprehensive final exam. The final exam date is set by the university and can be found by contacting the registrar's office. Midterms will be set at a time different from the regular lecture hour and the dates for the midterms will be announced later. There will be an optional discussion class each week when general concepts and homework will be discussed. You have to turn in your schedule to me within the first week so that I can set the dates for the weekly discussions and midterms when everyone is available. Very frequently, you will be working during the class on tutorials with a classmate. Each tutorial will be preceded by a pre-test and the pre-test and tutorial will generally take the whole class period. You should complete the tutorial at home if you did not complete it during the class. The post-test for each tutorial will be given in the following class. Tutorials will reinforce the material covered in lecture but sometimes they will be used to introduce new material. A majority of the questions in the pre-test and post-test for the tutorials will be conceptual. 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 to see how many of you obtained the correct answer. Each student will be assigned a personal response system transmitter (clicker). At the end of the class, please return the transmitter (clicker) to the correct bin number. It is important that you take the peer discussion seriously because you can learn a lot from your peers. Moreover, the kinds of questions asked in the class will help you understand that memorization of definitions is NOT the goal of the course and it is important that you start to pay attention to your knowledge structure and learn to interpret and draw inferences using various principles in diverse situations. The final grade will be determined by the homework (15%), tutorial pre-tests (5%) tutorial post-tests (15%), mid-term exams (15% each), and final exam (35%). You can earn upto 5 bonus points towards the course grade based upon your responses to the clicker questions. For the clicker questions, you will get 70% for trying each question regardless of whether they are correct or not and 100% if you get it correct.
 

If you have any questions, please contact me at: clsingh@pitt.edu 
  If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and the Office of Disability Resources and Services, 216 William Pitt Union, (412) 648-7890/(412) 383-7355 (TTY), as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodations for this course. Academic integrity is very important. Anybody found cheating in the course will obtain a failing grade in the course.