Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Yesterday, as I have mentioned here before (or in the student edition) was the practical exam of my general science requirement mechanics lab class.

This exam should have been emphasized to them from day one, because it is designed to minimize their absences in what most would probably consider as boring, throwaway lab experiments. And from the answers I got during the exam, having gone through four teachers this term the students mostly did not appreciate the practical applications of what they had been assigned to do for seven weeks.

As I also had expected, it was very easy to pinpoint those who actually performed the experiments and those who not only were not aware of what their group mates were doing at the time, but also didn’t bother on reviewing the manual as to the theory of the sessions.

But I was also in for a few surprises myself, given my assumption that the students would be doing the same experiments in the manual that I had passed on to the three teachers in order as each of them took over.

First of all, the “new” set up for the experiment of mechanical energy was not used (the one with the pendulum bob on a string and the blade) but the old set up with what they called the “half pipe” was used.

Second, for the projectile motion experiment, I was surprised when all three of those who described it said that they used the plotting board to back the carbon paper that the ball from the ramp hit, and that it was the ramp they adjusted for each set of trials, not the impact board.

For the uniform acceleration experiment, there were some students who (most likely from the manual) kept saying “the fourth dot of the ter), but when I asked them what a ter was, they said it was a measure of distance, when the correct answer is that it is one tenth of a second.

I will take a stand next term to assure this kind of travesty does not happen again.

Session 1437 didn’t even care about giving the teacher the correct answer in the practical exam. Class dismissed.