Category: Academic Integration

How To Get Better Grades In Physics

Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)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.

Get Better Grades By Understanding How Your Brain Works

Studying for last law school examOne of my favorite blogs is the British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Soci­ety’s Research Digest. It sum­ma­rizes cur­rent research in a way inter­est­ing to non-aca­d­e­mics. I eat that kind of stuff up.

Their most recent post is a real win­ner for col­lege stu­dents: 9 Evi­dence-Based Study Tips. You’ll receive a lot of advice in col­lege — but these prin­ci­ples actu­al­ly have exper­i­men­tal sup­port.

  1. Adopt a growth mind­set: believe that your brain is capa­ble of get­ting smarter. You’re not stuck where you are.
  2. Sleep well: inter­nal­ize that all-nighters hurt more than they help.
  3. For­give your­self for pro­cras­ti­nat­ing: as a min­is­ter, I was quite tak­en by this one. It’s a beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tion of a more gen­er­al les­son on grace as the pri­ma­ry cat­a­lyst for growth in life.
  4. Test your­self: don’t just review the mate­r­i­al — turn it into a quiz.
  5. Pace your stud­ies: review the mate­r­i­al once 20% of the time elaps­es between the day you first learned it and the day of the test. Com­bin­ing this with the pre­vi­ous tip will rev­o­lu­tion­ize your study life.
  6. Vivid exam­ples may not always work best. This is more of a tip for teach­ers, so here’s the stu­dent ver­sion: don’t assume that the charis­mat­ic teacher will help you under­stand bet­ter sim­ply because they enter­tain you more. Be sus­pi­cious of vivid illus­tra­tions because they can make it hard­er to learn the abstract prin­ci­ples you must mas­ter.
  7. Take naps: lie down and rest for 10–30 min­utes. It will help more than you think.
  8. Get hand­outs pri­or to the lec­ture: the evi­dence for this one seemed weak to me. Read it and judge for your­self.
  9. Believe in your­self: con­fi­dence mat­ters. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re prob­a­bly right.

Each tip has a brief para­graph explain­ing the prin­ci­ple in more detail includ­ing links to the research upon which it is based. Go read it now!

You’re wel­come.

The Deceptiveness of Sin — Deeper Than You Thought

Justice Preveils?Simon M. Lahama, Adam L. Alterb, and Geof­frey P. Good­winc report a sur­pris­ing result in “Easy on the mind, easy on the wrong­do­er: Dis­crepant­ly flu­ent vio­la­tions are deemed less moral­ly wrong” Cog­ni­tion, Vol­ume 112, Issue 3, Sep­tem­ber 2009, pages 462–466.

From the paper:

Par­tic­i­pants com­plet­ed a ques­tion­naire in which they read six vignettes describ­ing var­i­ous moral vio­la­tions: ‘Punch’ (one man punch­es anoth­er in a bar), ‘Flag’ (teacher burns Aus­tralian flag in class), ‘Dog’ (fam­i­ly eats its dead dog), ‘Deface’ (man defaces a memo­r­i­al), ‘Hitler’ (man taunts Jew­ish sports fans with Hitler imi­ta­tion), ‘Kiss’ (broth­er and sis­ter kiss pas­sion­ate­ly).

Each of the par­tic­i­pants read three of the sto­ries in an easy-to-read for­mat and the oth­er three in a hard­er-to-read for­mat.

In the words of the authors:

…dis­crepant per­cep­tu­al flu­en­cy decreased per­cep­tions of wrong­ness com­pared to dis­crepant dis­flu­en­cy. Fur­ther, and con­sis­tent with effects of dis­crepant flu­en­cy on truth judg­ments (Hansen et al., 2008), it seems that this dif­fer­ence is account­ed for by flu­ent pro­cess­ing decreas­ing, rather than dis­flu­ent pro­cess­ing increas­ing, per­cep­tions of wrong­ness.

In nor­mal Eng­lish: peo­ple thought that immoral choic­es were less seri­ous when they were easy to read about. In the­o­log­i­cal terms, they excused sin because of how good it looked (or more pre­cise­ly based upon how easy it was to under­stand). Appar­ent­ly clean­li­ness is next to god­li­ness (or at least leg­i­bil­i­ty is next to liv­ing right).

So the next time you have some­thing to con­fess, be sure to print it on nice paper and use a laser print­er. It just might give you the edge you need.

The heart is deceit­ful above all things and beyond cure. Who can under­stand it? (Jer 17:9)

The American Religious Impulse

I just read the most amaz­ing arti­cle by a Yale prof explain­ing the reli­gious impulse in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.

If you have any inter­est at all in pol­i­tics, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, anti-Amer­i­can­ism, or the role of reli­gion in pub­lic life you real­ly ought to give this arti­cle a read: Americanism–And Its Ene­mies by David Gel­ern­ter (that’s his fac­ul­ty bio page, there’s a much more inter­est­ing pro­file here). If you want to have your mind blown wide-open, read Ama­zon’s sum­ma­ry of his sur­vival of an attack from the Unabomber.

Also, we have new pho­tos in the gallery.

Religion By Major

Check out the results (or see some detailed data) of a nation­al sur­vey of 3,680 stu­dents by UCLA’s High­er Edu­ca­tion Research Insti­tute [which] found that reli­gious com­mit­ment runs strongest among fine arts, edu­ca­tion and human­i­ties majors and low­est among biol­o­gy, his­to­ry and soci­ol­o­gy majors.

I found one excerpt fas­ci­nat­ing: In addi­tion, Astin found that arts and human­i­ties majors were twice as like­ly to exhib­it signs of “spir­i­tu­al dis­tress” — ques­tion­ing beliefs, strug­gling to under­stand evil, wrestling with reli­gious upbring­ing — as busi­ness or com­put­er sci­ence stu­dents.

Still, Astin said it is pre­ma­ture to label all sci­en­tists or com­put­er whizzes as spir­i­tu­al­ly hol­low. Most of these aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines sim­ply don’t prompt or pro­mote spir­i­tu­al reflec­tion, he said.

Implic­it in there is the notion that stu­dents who don’t exhib­it signs of “spir­i­tu­al dis­tress” can be sup­posed to be “spir­i­tu­al­ly hol­low”. Inter­est­ing. I won­der how much of that is Astin’s real per­spectve and how much of that is the byprod­uct of the inter­view­er’s line of ques­tion­ing.

Also of note: Stu­dents who par­ty fre­quent­ly are more like­ly to stop attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices, and “spir­i­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted” stu­dents gen­er­al­ly earn high­er grades.

Stu­dents who score high on mea­sures of spir­i­tu­al com­mit­ment gen­er­al­ly are health­i­er, hap­pi­er and more involved in com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice.

Thanks to World Mag­a­zine blog for unearthing this link!

Religion and Economic Growth Linked

Here’s an inter­est­ing sto­ry from the New York Times: Research Around the World Links Reli­gion to Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment.

Intrigu­ing excerpts:

Since the Ger­man soci­ol­o­gist Max Weber wrote about the Protes­tant work eth­ic and the spir­it of cap­i­tal­ism, social sci­en­tists have argued that cul­ture — includ­ing reli­gious habits — is part of the com­plex mix that deter­mines a coun­try’s eco­nom­ic health. What dis­tin­guish­es the work of Mr. Bar­ro and Ms. McCleary, some schol­ars said, is that it uses a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of a huge set of data to quan­ti­fy the argu­ments of anthro­pol­o­gists, soci­ol­o­gists and polit­i­cal sci­en­tists.

…

As the cou­ple began their study, Ms. McCleary said, it was clear that the wide­ly dis­cussed sec­u­lar­iza­tion the­sis — the idea that a coun­try becomes more sec­u­lar as it becomes rich­er and more indus­tri­al­ized — did not apply to the Unit­ed States, one of the most reli­gious nations in the world.

And over the last 30 years, many East Asian coun­tries, includ­ing Malaysia, Sin­ga­pore and South Korea, have expe­ri­enced both rapid eco­nom­ic growth and the spread of Chris­tian­i­ty, Mr. Bar­ro said.

“South Korea is a good exam­ple of that rapid growth and more reli­gion,” he said. There the num­ber of con­verts from Con­fu­cian­ism and oth­er East­ern reli­gions to Chris­tian­i­ty is grow­ing rapid­ly, he explained.

Some of the low­est lev­els of reli­gios­i­ty were found in Chi­na and North Korea. The low­est lev­els of eco­nom­ic growth were in sub-Saha­ran African coun­tries. The for­mer East Ger­many (which includes Weber’s birth­place) was one of the low­est in both reli­gios­i­ty and growth.

Flannery O’Connor on writing Christian fiction

Take heed, all you bud­ding nov­el­ists — Flan­nery O’Con­nor has shown the way! Read all about it in O’Con­nor v. the Antichrist.

A few quotes from O’Con­nor tak­en from the essay:

“If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I had­n’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the neces­si­ty of fight­ing it, I would be the stinkingest log­i­cal pos­i­tivist you ever saw right now.”

In her most famous state­ment about her work, she explained that “to the hard of hear­ing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and star­tling fig­ures.”

“All my sto­ries,” she wrote, “are about the action of grace on a char­ac­ter who is not very will­ing to sup­port it.”

O’Con­nor once wrote that “more than ever now it seems that the king­dom of heav­en has to be tak­en by vio­lence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that push­es against you.”

Check out the essay (or at least check out some of O’Con­nor’s books).

Christian Professors Help Out In Afghanistan

Rebuild­ing Afghanistan U is a fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of how well-edu­cat­ed Chris­tians can make a dif­fer­ence.

It talks about how the Inter­na­tion­al Insti­tute for Chris­t­ian Stud­ies sent pro­fes­sors to Afghanistan after the war against the Tal­iban to rebuild their high­er-edu­ca­tion infra­struc­ture.

The group is very picky about its can­di­dates’ cre­den­tials (a grad­u­ate degree is a must), expe­ri­ence, and Chris­t­ian wit­ness. Only one of 10 appli­cants gets accept­ed. When Com­mu­nist coun­tries ask CEO Daryl McCarthy for teach­ers, he says some­thing like this:

“You want expe­ri­enced, hard-work­ing, eth­i­cal pro­fes­sion­als? We’ll get them for you. In fact, IICS is so par­tic­u­lar that we make sure that every one of them is a Chris­t­ian.” Says McCarthy: “It’s fun to hear the for­eign offi­cials say, ‘Ah, yes, very good. That’s what we need.’ ”

The arti­cle is fas­ci­nat­ing and well worth a read.

Dick Staub Interviews Mary Poplin

I just ran across a tran­script of an inter­view with Mary Poplin.

Dr. Poplin is the Dean of the School of Edu­ca­tion­al Stud­ies at Clare­mont Grad­u­ate Uni­ver­si­ty and she’s cur­rent­ly writ­ing a book (title unknown) about inte­grat­ing faith and acad­e­mia. (see her fac­ul­ty bio page)

You should real­ly read the inter­view on Dick Staub’s web­site, but I’ve excerpt­ed the most fas­ci­nat­ing bits…
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Dick Staub Inter­views Mary Poplin”

Jesus, Ethics, and Us

these are notes from a class pre­sen­ta­tion I gave in Ron Howard’s class The Eth­i­cal Ana­lyst about ethics in Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive

The Hid­den Dan­ger of Ethics Class­es
There is a great but hid­den dan­ger in class­es such as this. By spend­ing hours debat­ing moral issues we too often train our­selves for ratio­nal­iza­tion instead of right­eous­ness. There is no point in try­ing to under­stand good unless we also seek to be good!

Why Should We Care What Chris­tian­i­ty Says?
Today it is com­mon to regard Chris­tian­i­ty as moral­ly bank­rupt. This is naïve and rep­re­sents mas­sive prej­u­dice.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Jesus, Ethics, and Us”