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Re: [Phys-l] Cramster et al.



Hi all-
My solution to this issue has been to ban the use of calculators and take off points for precise answers. Answers to numerical prohlems are required to be estimates, with no reward for accuracy. Just get the anaswer in the right ball park, and show how you got there. Pi=3 and pi^2 =10.
Regards,
Jack

"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn Valley




On Sun, 9 May 2010, Brian Whatcott wrote:

David Craig wrote:
/snip/
. Learning physics in upper level occurs through working problems. Whatever incentive structure one designs, that aspect won't change. While I have historically been a fan of rewarding the hard work the best students put in to problem sets, that's becoming more complicated.

(As far as looking examples up in books, while true -- I remember this as a student as well -- this generation of student barely knows what a book, let alone a library, is. Or rather, they know what they are, but they seem totally unwilling to actually use them. Cramster has brought the problem to a whole new level -- giving complete solutions book by book, problem by problem. They don't have to spend hours poring through books -- a process that might actually teach them something, I might add -- everything is just a couple of clicks away.)

One reasonably effective approach is a kind of seminar-style problem workshop where students are responsible for preparing solutions to problems and then presenting them to the rest of the class, thus forcing them to _explain_ what they may (or may not) have copied. There usually isn't time to cover everything, but if students know that they can be called on to present any of the problems on any given day, and that if they are called on and aren't prepared, they don't receive credit, that's pretty effective incentive. I've not in the past relied on this model to the exclusion of problem sets, but I may give it a try this coming year. I'd be interested in the wisdom and experience of those who implement something like this approach.

David Craig


<http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/>

As an outsider looking in, I am greatly troubled by this and other
evidence of how students are finding ways to respond to difficult
materials. I see the solutions manuals being hawked on
Engineering/science newsgroups, and I am not pleased.

Then I recall that practitioners in various fields use whatever tools
they can in handling real world problems. It was amusing to read that a
creator of one particular math solver application was asked how he
addressed the requirement of solving differential/integral equations, to
which he replied, '...by having the application look up the standard
forms from an internal list, in the usual way...' - to the sound of
groans from his audience.

I read here, that the use of calculators in the class room stunts the
facility for mental arithmetic that teachers formerly prized.
Supposing that a student who was adept with a strong symbolic solver
might be able to solve some homework questions with ease, if he could
only set out the requirements in some rational form, then this form of
homework might provide in fact, an exceptionally valuable trait in the
'after-life'. That would not be cheating, or would it?

Brian W
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