How To Get Better Grades In Physics

Ben Shank is a Ph.D. can­di­date in physics at Stan­ford, where he also serves as a teach­ing assis­tant (TA) for an under­grad physics course. At our recent Thanks­giv­ing par­ty he began rat­tling off advice to one of our stu­dents on how to get bet­ter grades in physics (or almost any tech­ni­cal course). Said stu­dent was amazed and beseeched Ben to make this infor­ma­tion more pub­licly avail­able, and so he typed it up and sent it to our Chi Alpha email list.

With Ben’s per­mis­sion, I also share it below (empha­sis is mine):

1. From the first day of class, sit in the front of the room toward the cen­ter. At least one study has shown that stu­dents who sit in the front are 2–3 times more like­ly to get an A and 6 times less like­ly to fail than stu­dents sit­ting in the back even when seats are ran­dom­ly assigned on the first day of class. We can debate why this is so all day, but it is so, so take advan­tage of it. (By ‘the front’ i mean the first ten or so rows of Hewlett 200.)
2. Be sure to get plen­ty of sleep the two nights before the exam. Of all the bad con­di­tions you could be in going into a physics test, being tired is prob­a­bly the worst one that is legal. Stud­ies indi­cate that the sec­ond night before the test is even more impor­tant than the night imme­di­ate­ly before. A clear, think­ing, cre­ative mind is your sin­gle great­est asset for any physics you might encounter. If you have been keep­ing up with the class, get­ting two full nights of sleep is prob­a­bly more impor­tant than any amount of study­ing you might do dur­ing those two days.
3. That said you will prob­a­bly want to do some study­ing. If you haven’t already, I high­ly rec­om­mend find­ing some­one else in the class to study with. Go over prob­lems togeth­er. Go into the lat­er prob­lems in each chap­ter and pick some that you’re not sure you can both do. Tak­ing an exam well is very sim­i­lar to teach­ing the grad­er how to do the prob­lems, so even if you are teach­ing a friend how to do some­thing you already know, you are prepar­ing for the test. If you both (or all) get stuck on some­thing, con­tact a TA.
4. Read every prob­lem at the begin­ning of the test. Your mind will con­tin­ue to process prob­lems you are not look­ing at, pro­vid­ed it is awake. (See Tip 2) Stud­ies show that you are best served load­ing all the ques­tions into your brain at the start to give your­self max­i­mum time to con­tem­plate. If you get real­ly stuck on a prob­lem, leave plen­ty of space and move on. Odds are you’ll have bet­ter insight when you come back to it.
5. DON’T PANIC. Attempt every ques­tion. This sounds real­ly obvi­ous, but we occa­sion­al­ly get blue books that have a few scrib­bles labeled ‘Prob­lem 1’ and noth­ing else. As best we can tell, these stu­dents are look­ing at the first ques­tion, pan­ick­ing and star­ing blankly at the paper for forty-five min­utes or just walk­ing out. This is some­thing worth prac­tic­ing to avoid. If you find your­self in a pan­ic: stop, look away from the paper while slow­ly count­ing to ten. If you are feel­ing calm, you can go back and draw a dia­gram or write down some pos­si­bly rel­e­vant equa­tions. If you start pan­ick­ing again, repeat Steps 1 and 2. If you are not feel­ing calm, turn a cou­ple pages and start the next ques­tion. Things will look bet­ter when you come back to this one. Trust me.
6. Now for a few tips on get­ting the most [points] out of your graders. Grad­ing a midterm takes 4–5 hours. As much as we try to assess each of you accord­ing to all the knowl­edge of physics you demon­strat­ed, we are going to get tired and even­tu­al­ly parts of our brains are going to go on autopi­lot. If your answers are in clear­ly marked box­es (prefer­ably near the left side of the page) and they are right, there is a reduced chance of any error in your work being marked off. If an answer is wrong, but it’s in a box near the left side of the page imme­di­ate­ly below the work that pro­duced it, then it is very easy for us to find the one lit­tle error and give you most of the points. I know hav­ing all the answers in one box at the bot­tom of the page feels con­cise, but if one of them is wrong we have no idea where on the page to look for the mis­take. On a relat­ed note, it is bet­ter if you work one part of a prob­lem and then work the next one below it. Believe it or not, grad stu­dents can get con­fused if part c is to the right of part b instead of below it. It’s sil­ly, but after a few hours of grad­ing that’s the way we are, so you might as well not let it hurt you. As a gen­er­al rule, each line on the page should only have one equa­tion or state­ment on it. (pic­tures exclud­ed) You may use up more pages that way, but there’s no short­age of blue books.
7. When­ev­er pos­si­ble, draw a pic­ture. Not only will it help you think, but it also helps us know what you were think­ing. If you are not absolute­ly con­fi­dent in your solu­tion, a minute spent draw­ing a decent pic­ture is prob­a­bly worth it in terms of par­tial cred­it. Too often I’ve sus­pect­ed a stu­dent knew more than their answer indi­cat­ed, but they did­n’t leave a good record of their thought process so I could­n’t grant par­tial cred­it. And that makes me sad. (Orga­niz­ing graph­ics are also great anti­dotes to pan­ic, see Tip 5.)
8. When you get an answer, check that it makes sense. Neg­a­tive lengths and times are often indi­ca­tors that you’ve made a mis­take, as are e.g. mega­Coulomb charges and kilo­Amp cur­rents. If this hap­pens to you, go look for the error and fix it. If you can’t find it, let us know that you don’t like the answer and why. One of the eas­i­est ways to tell that some­one is lost is if they give you a non-phys­i­cal answer and don’t blink. As a physi­cist, it is much eas­i­er to grade lenient­ly if a stu­dent indi­cates that they under­stand why the result of their cal­cu­la­tion can’t be right. If noth­ing else, the grad­ing rubric often has a point des­ig­nat­ed just for hav­ing a result that could be true. You’ll at least get that.
9. It is well known that hav­ing good hand­writ­ing improves the atti­tude of those grad­ing your exam. What is less well known is that hav­ing tiny hand­writ­ing can hurt you. Often what is per­fect­ly leg­i­ble to you while you are curled up with your nose 12 inch­es from the paper makes our eyes hurt after the third or fourth hour of grad­ing. Obvi­ous­ly this vast­ly reduces the incen­tive to hunt for that tiny lit­tle math error you made in part a. This is not a small mat­ter. I, for one, tend to get a migraine when I bend over small text for too long. So imag­ine a three hour migraine and then gauge the incen­tive to just mark you off so I can stop look­ing at your paper. Find a test that you have tak­en recent­ly. If you (or bet­ter, a friend) can’t clear­ly read your text at arm’s length, you might con­sid­er con­scious­ly writ­ing larg­er on all tests from now on. Grad­ing fatigue isn’t lim­it­ed to physics TAs.

And that’s what Ben has to say about that. Hope it helps you out as finals draw nigh.