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If you majored in physics, you'd probably come to find out this isn't specific to CalTech, but it's typically specific to hard sciences and engineering discipli

by batbomb 12y ago

If you majored in physics, you'd probably come to find out this isn't specific to CalTech, but it's typically specific to hard sciences and engineering disciplines. Probably 80% of the physics courses I've taken (and people that I know have taken) are almost all like this. Open Note and/or Open Note+Homework and/or Open Book (and occasionally open laptop), typically with a class averages of around 40-70% on the exam

WalterBright 12y ago
I don't know about how other colleges do it. But I have run into a lot of "formula plugger" engineers who, as far as I could tell, did not understand where those formulas came from nor when the formulas were inapplicable. I also majored in ME. Caltech requires 2 years of Physics for everyone.
- Balgair 12y ago
  That is no necessarily a bad thing though. When you are designing a bridge, you had better not be deriving equations. My grandfather was an flight repair manager. He always had the tables up on the walls for the guys, not even equations. His thinking was that if you remembered the torque on the wheel brakes, you could also mis-remember them. Therefore, 'Never remember anything!' was the motto. I can only assume this maxim came about after a very scary incident. This also applied to much engineering and design. Yes, it is sad to see and hear about minds gone to 'waste', but it is very necessary for life to not go to waste.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    In my experience, when people used formulas with no understanding of where those formulas came from, nor what assumptions underlaid them, they misapplied them. All book formulas are based on models, which have limitations. Would you really want formula pluggers designing life critical systems? Not me. Book values, however, provide valuable feedback on whether an answer is correct or not. While the book may not provide the right formula for the job, it often provides formulas that "bracket" the right answer, and so can be used as a reasonableness check. A central part of engineering design are reasonableness checks.
    - Balgair 12y ago
      To speak on civil engineering, of which I have only observed from the outside: They do use formulas and calculate things, but they do NOT recalculate the constants, even though they may be derived each time. The tensile strength for steel is just assumed, from what I can tell, even though it falls out of tests and formulas itself. In fact, I would trust the computer better than the deriver. The guy that just plugs it in, in a proven system, is safer to my ears. The guy that recalculates everytime is bound to have false positives and negatives and whatnot in the calculations. A good aphorism is 'A man that has one watch knows the time, a man with 2 is never sure.' I do agree on the standard values though, it does give a ball park, and that is valuable. One thing to keep in mind is that the brain power required to do all these calculations simply does not exist. Physicists typically are less then 5% of a undergraduate class, I'd actually argue for less, but I haven't a source. These are the guys that can run the calculations through everytime. However, the need for the various jobs is FAR outstripped by the output. Hence you get engineering and the margin of safety, as we know you can't get the proper people in there, but you have to get someone to check at least something otherwise the people will just make it regardless of safety. And then boom, bob's your uncle, you get the casualty differences between Chinese earthquakes and the 6er in Napa. Yes, it's not much, but it's better than nothing.
btoptical 12y ago
Yep at Univ. of Rochester as physics undergrads we were often allowed a single sheet of paper with anything on it (we were told no microfiche!). I did a few open book exams but still made the "cheat" sheet. We all spent a great deal of time preparing that sheet. You had to study to really know what to put on the sheet. I often found that I did not need the sheet in the actual exam because the process of preparing it helped to bring the concepts forward in my mind. In grad school as classes got more difficult, we had take home exams even. I always dreaded these because they were substantially more difficult than a regular exam. Generally if you didn't have the concepts down, having an entire library at your disposal was not helpful in that case.
- snogglethorpe 12y ago
  The "cheat sheet" thing was common at my university too. It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best? More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation...
  - jackvalentine 12y ago
    My university was the same for most math classes, but some allowed printed notes. Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.
  - pdkl95 12y ago
    The engineering dept at UCDavis went well beyond a single page, and usually allowed anything you wanted as long as it was print-only, book included. (nothing electronic or networked, obviously) The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up. If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete. I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions. /* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */
findjashua 12y ago
While the Physics courses at UIUC allowed us to bring in a 'cheat-sheet', the homeworks and the exams were pretty much 'plug-and-chug' multiple-choice questions. Back in high school (in India), Physics used to be my favorite subject. It demystified the underpinnings of natural phenomena. In fact, Electromagentism was the main reason I decided to major in Electrical Engineering. Unfortunately, the Physics courses in college left a really bad taste in my mouth.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  I'm sorry for your bad experience with college Physics. May I recommend "Einstein" by Isaacson for some really great prose about the wonder of what Einstein did and tried to do.
- praneshp 12y ago
  I feel your pain. Engineering Physics (or Chemistry or Math for that matter) in India destroys your love of the subjects that brought you in there in the first place.

by batbomb 12y ago

WalterBright 12y ago

I don't know about how other colleges do it. But I have run into a lot of "formula plugger" engineers who, as far as I could tell, did not understand where those formulas came from nor when the formulas were inapplicable. I also majored in ME. Caltech requires 2 years of Physics for everyone.

Balgair 12y ago
That is no necessarily a bad thing though. When you are designing a bridge, you had better not be deriving equations. My grandfather was an flight repair manager. He always had the tables up on the walls for the guys, not even equations. His thinking was that if you remembered the torque on the wheel brakes, you could also mis-remember them. Therefore, 'Never remember anything!' was the motto. I can only assume this maxim came about after a very scary incident. This also applied to much engineering and design. Yes, it is sad to see and hear about minds gone to 'waste', but it is very necessary for life to not go to waste.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  In my experience, when people used formulas with no understanding of where those formulas came from, nor what assumptions underlaid them, they misapplied them. All book formulas are based on models, which have limitations. Would you really want formula pluggers designing life critical systems? Not me. Book values, however, provide valuable feedback on whether an answer is correct or not. While the book may not provide the right formula for the job, it often provides formulas that "bracket" the right answer, and so can be used as a reasonableness check. A central part of engineering design are reasonableness checks.
  - Balgair 12y ago
    To speak on civil engineering, of which I have only observed from the outside: They do use formulas and calculate things, but they do NOT recalculate the constants, even though they may be derived each time. The tensile strength for steel is just assumed, from what I can tell, even though it falls out of tests and formulas itself. In fact, I would trust the computer better than the deriver. The guy that just plugs it in, in a proven system, is safer to my ears. The guy that recalculates everytime is bound to have false positives and negatives and whatnot in the calculations. A good aphorism is 'A man that has one watch knows the time, a man with 2 is never sure.' I do agree on the standard values though, it does give a ball park, and that is valuable. One thing to keep in mind is that the brain power required to do all these calculations simply does not exist. Physicists typically are less then 5% of a undergraduate class, I'd actually argue for less, but I haven't a source. These are the guys that can run the calculations through everytime. However, the need for the various jobs is FAR outstripped by the output. Hence you get engineering and the margin of safety, as we know you can't get the proper people in there, but you have to get someone to check at least something otherwise the people will just make it regardless of safety. And then boom, bob's your uncle, you get the casualty differences between Chinese earthquakes and the 6er in Napa. Yes, it's not much, but it's better than nothing.

btoptical 12y ago

Yep at Univ. of Rochester as physics undergrads we were often allowed a single sheet of paper with anything on it (we were told no microfiche!). I did a few open book exams but still made the "cheat" sheet. We all spent a great deal of time preparing that sheet. You had to study to really know what to put on the sheet. I often found that I did not need the sheet in the actual exam because the process of preparing it helped to bring the concepts forward in my mind. In grad school as classes got more difficult, we had take home exams even. I always dreaded these because they were substantially more difficult than a regular exam. Generally if you didn't have the concepts down, having an entire library at your disposal was not helpful in that case.

snogglethorpe 12y ago
The "cheat sheet" thing was common at my university too. It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best? More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation...
- jackvalentine 12y ago
  My university was the same for most math classes, but some allowed printed notes. Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.
- pdkl95 12y ago
  The engineering dept at UCDavis went well beyond a single page, and usually allowed anything you wanted as long as it was print-only, book included. (nothing electronic or networked, obviously) The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up. If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete. I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions. /* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */

findjashua 12y ago

While the Physics courses at UIUC allowed us to bring in a 'cheat-sheet', the homeworks and the exams were pretty much 'plug-and-chug' multiple-choice questions. Back in high school (in India), Physics used to be my favorite subject. It demystified the underpinnings of natural phenomena. In fact, Electromagentism was the main reason I decided to major in Electrical Engineering. Unfortunately, the Physics courses in college left a really bad taste in my mouth.

WalterBright 12y ago
I'm sorry for your bad experience with college Physics. May I recommend "Einstein" by Isaacson for some really great prose about the wonder of what Einstein did and tried to do.
praneshp 12y ago
I feel your pain. Engineering Physics (or Chemistry or Math for that matter) in India destroys your love of the subjects that brought you in there in the first place.