Candy Is Edible Joy

November 1, 2006: Treats!Can­dy is a good thing. Can­dy is joy giv­en caloric expres­sion. Can­dy is, to twist an old say­ing, proof that God loves us and wants us to be hap­py.

I do not think my wife believes this in her heart. She is a mom, and there is a lot of pres­sure on moms to believe that can­dy is bad. In the land of moms, can­dy is a con­trolled sub­stance. One, inci­den­tal­ly, for which med­ical pre­scrip­tions are not forth­com­ing.

And so as we were going to bed on Hal­loween I told her, “There’s some­thing impor­tant we need to estab­lish before we go to sleep tonight. The pres­ence of left­over can­dy in our house is not a prob­lem to be solved, it is a joy to be cel­e­brat­ed. We don’t have to give it away, throw it away, or find some cre­ative use for it. Eat­ing it will be suf­fi­cient.”

I felt like a Mor­mon knock­ing on Richard Dawkins’ door, but some­times a dad has to step up. Edi­ble joy is a rare thing and worth defend­ing.

Are You Kidding Me, Vanderbilt?

/dohA while ago I went off on the Supreme Court’s hor­ren­dous deci­sion in CLS vs Mar­tinez.

This morn­ing’s news reveals the log­i­cal out­work­ing of that sil­ly rul­ing: Van­der­bilt, appar­ent­ly fol­low­ing the same train of thought, has put sev­er­al Chris­t­ian groups on pro­ba­tion for vio­lat­ing the uni­ver­si­ty’s non-dis­crim­i­na­tion pol­i­cy.

Among the groups threat­ened with shut down is the Chris­t­ian Legal Soci­ety. It ran afoul with this lan­guage from its con­sti­tu­tion. “Each offi­cer is expect­ed to lead Bible stud­ies, prayer and wor­ship at chap­ter meet­ings.” CLS Pres­i­dent Justin Gunter told me, “We come togeth­er to do things that Chris­tians do togeth­er. Pray, and have Bible stud­ies.” To that, Rev. Gretchen Per­son – inter­im direc­tor of the Office of Reli­gious Life at Van­der­bilt – respond­ed “Van­der­bilt poli­cies do not allow this expectation/qualification for offi­cers.” (source)

Seri­ous­ly, Van­der­bilt? A Chris­t­ian group can­not require that its lead­ers lead Chris­t­ian activ­i­ties? One won­ders what, pre­cise­ly, Van­der­bilt envi­sions the lead­ers of Chris­t­ian groups doing.

Evil, Thy Acronym Is NCAA

Stanford to tip off March MadnessTech­ni­cal­ly, NCAA is an ini­tial­ism rather than an acronym — but you know what I mean.

I have long been irked at the way the col­lege sports com­plex abus­es stu­dents, but I was absolute­ly floored by some of the details Tay­lor Branch shared in “The Shame of Col­lege Sports” (pub­lished in The Atlantic).

Two snip­pets to whet your appetite:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jor­dan, the pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of Penn State, “should a uni­ver­si­ty be an adver­tis­ing medi­um for your indus­try?”

Vac­caro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to con­tin­ue sell­ing them. You can be very moral and right­eous in ask­ing me that ques­tion, sir,” Vac­caro added with irre­press­ible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our mon­ey. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

And lat­er:

But after an inquiry that took me into lock­er rooms and ivory tow­ers across the coun­try, I have come to believe that sen­ti­ment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time col­lege sports are ful­ly com­mer­cial­ized. Bil­lions of dol­lars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes mon­ey, and enables uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­ra­tions to make mon­ey, from the unpaid labor of young ath­letes.

Slav­ery analo­gies should be used care­ful­ly. Col­lege ath­letes are not slaves. Yet to sur­vey the scene—corporations and uni­ver­si­ties enrich­ing them­selves on the backs of uncom­pen­sat­ed young men, whose sta­tus as “stu­dent-ath­letes” deprives them of the right to due process guar­an­teed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmis­tak­able whiff of the plan­ta­tion. Per­haps a more apt metaphor is colo­nial­ism: col­lege sports, as over­seen by the NCAA, is a sys­tem imposed by well-mean­ing pater­nal­ists and ratio­nal­ized with hoary sen­ti­ments about car­ing for the well-being of the col­o­nized. But it is, nonethe­less, unjust. The NCAA, in its zeal­ous defense of bogus prin­ci­ples, some­times destroys the dreams of inno­cent young ath­letes.

The whole thing is worth read­ing, so zip over to The Atlantic and read “The Shame of Col­lege Sports” now.

The Church In China

Welcome to the Great Wall of ChinaI recent­ly lis­tened to a Research on Reli­gion pod­cast about house church­es in Chi­na and learned four things.

First, I’ve known for years that the state-run Protes­tant church in Chi­na is called the Three Self Patri­ot­ic Move­ment in Chi­na, but I nev­er real­ized where the name came from. Here’s a hint: think mis­si­ol­o­gy. That’s right — the three selves in the Three Self Patri­ot­ic Move­ment are “self-sup­port­ing, self-gov­ern­ing, self-prop­a­gat­ing.” I am an idiot for nev­er mak­ing that con­nec­tion. I bet there’s a good sto­ry behind it.

Sec­ond, one of the unreg­is­tered church­es in Chi­na (com­mon­ly called house church­es) has grown to around 500,000 mem­bers. That is not a typo — this one “house church” has half a mil­lion mem­bers. Wow. That blows my mind.

Third, the unreg­is­tered rur­al church­es are almost entire­ly Pentecostal/charismatic and the unreg­is­tered urban church­es are more sedate­ly evan­gel­i­cal. The unreg­is­tered urban church­es tend to be led by uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors and oth­er intel­lec­tu­als. Inter­est­ing.

Fourth, Chi­na has large­ly stopped send­ing pas­tors of unreg­is­tered church­es to labor camps because the pas­tors were too effec­tive at plant­i­ng church­es in prison. Now the state uses indi­rect pres­sure to thwart church­es, so that the Com­mu­nist par­ty pres­sures land­lords to can­cel leas­es and employ­ers to has­sle employ­ees.

After lis­ten­ing to the pod­cast and reflect­ing on it for a while I real­ized that there’s an inter­est­ing con­trast between the chal­lenges faced by the church in Chi­na and those faced by the church in Amer­i­ca. Amer­i­ca seeks to seduce the Church into com­pla­cen­cy, where­as Chi­na seeks to intim­i­date the Church into com­pli­ance.

These chal­lenges cor­re­spond to the strate­gies Satan deploys against the Church in the book of Rev­e­la­tion: Baby­lon (seduc­tion) and the Beast (intim­i­da­tion).

No, I did not just say that Chi­na is the Beast nor did I say that Amer­i­ca is the Great Har­lot called Baby­lon. I mere­ly said that Chi­na and Amer­i­ca resem­ble them in cer­tain ways.

If this intrigues you check out the free online book The Return­ing King by Vern Poythress. It’s one of the best intro­duc­tions to the book of Rev­e­la­tion that I know.

All in all that was one of the more stim­u­lat­ing pod­casts I’ve heard late­ly.

Punishment

Chinese Punishment, Whipping A Lawbreaker [c1900] Attribution Unk [RESTORED]I recent­ly read an arti­cle in the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion called “In Defense of Flog­ging” by Peter Moskos, a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York (specif­i­cal­ly at the John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice).

The arti­cle seems to have been writ­ten to gin up inter­est in a book he has com­ing out in June called, well, In Defense of Flog­ging.

With­out fur­ther ado, an excerpt:

For most of the past two cen­turies, at least in so-called civ­i­lized soci­eties, the ide­al of pun­ish­ment has been replaced by the hope of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. The Amer­i­can pen­i­ten­tiary sys­tem was invent­ed to replace pun­ish­ment with “cure.” Pris­ons were built around the noble ideas of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. In soci­ety, at least in lib­er­al soci­ety, we’re sup­posed to be above pun­ish­ment, as if pun­ish­ment were some­how beneath us. The fact that pris­ons proved both inhu­mane and mis­er­ably inef­fec­tive did lit­tle to deter the utopi­an enthu­si­asm of those reform­ers who wished to abol­ish pun­ish­ment.

Incar­cer­a­tion, for adults as well as chil­dren, does lit­tle but make peo­ple more crim­i­nal. Alas, so suc­cess­ful were the “pro­gres­sive” reform­ers of the past two cen­turies that today we don’t have a sys­tem designed for pun­ish­ment. Cer­tain­ly released pris­on­ers need help with life—jobs, hous­ing, health care—but what they don’t need is a failed con­cept of “reha­bil­i­ta­tion.” Pris­ons today have all but aban­doned reha­bil­i­ta­tive ideals—which isn’t such a bad thing if one sees the notion as noth­ing more than pater­nal­is­tic hog­wash. All that is left is pun­ish­ment, and we cer­tain­ly could pun­ish in a way that is much cheap­er, hon­est, and even more humane. We could flog.

Yes. He just argued for flog­ging as a more enlight­ened view than impris­on­ment.

Pause for a moment to let your brain adjust to that.

Trou­bled? Get ready — he’s about to own you.

The open­ing gam­bit of the book is sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple: If you were sen­tenced to five years in prison but had the option of receiv­ing lash­es instead, what would you choose? You would prob­a­bly pick flog­ging. Would­n’t we all?

I pro­pose we give con­victs the choice of the lash at the rate of two lash­es per year of incar­cer­a­tion. One can­not rea­son­ably argue that mere­ly offer­ing this choice is some­how cru­el, espe­cial­ly when the sta­tus quo of incar­cer­a­tion remains an option. Prison means los­ing a part of your life and every­thing you care for. Com­pared with this, flog­ging is just a few very painful strokes on the back­side. And it’s over in a few min­utes. Often, and often very quick­ly, those who said flog­ging is too cru­el to even con­sid­er sud­den­ly say that flog­ging isn’t cru­el enough.

I found the arti­cle fas­ci­nat­ing and have been telling peo­ple about it since I read it. And I’ve asked them if they would per­son­al­ly pre­fer flog­ging to prison. Every­one I have posed the ques­tion to has opt­ed for excru­ci­at­ing phys­i­cal pain.

I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed by the dif­fer­ent notions of jus­tice. I remem­ber hear­ing Jim Rai­ley argue quite con­vinc­ing­ly in sem­i­nary that the prop­er Chris­t­ian notion of jus­tice is pri­mar­i­ly ret­ribu­tive (pun­ish­ment-ori­ent­ed) rather than reha­bil­i­ta­tive. Not that Chris­tians are opposed to reha­bil­i­ta­tion — but we ought to think of reha­bil­i­ta­tion as a func­tion of mer­cy and not of jus­tice. Per­haps some­times we should pur­sue mer­cy instead of jus­tice, and oth­er times we should offer mer­cy fol­low­ing jus­tice. But we should­n’t pre­tend that they are iden­ti­cal.

Inci­den­tal­ly, if you con­ceive of jus­tice in pure­ly reha­bil­i­ta­tive terms then you prob­a­bly can’t believe in hell or in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. If, on the oth­er hand, you believe that jus­tice is essen­tial­ly ret­ribu­tive then both are viable intel­lec­tu­al options for you.

Agree with Dr. Moskos or not, you should at least read the whole arti­cle. There’s way more than I’ve quot­ed here. I should also note that he does­n’t seem to be seri­ous­ly argu­ing for flog­ging itself so much as he is argu­ing for fix­ing our bro­ken crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Con­sid­er his con­clu­sion:

…how can offer­ing crim­i­nals the choice of the lash in lieu of incar­cer­a­tion be so bad? If flog­ging were real­ly worse than prison, nobody would choose it. Of course most peo­ple would choose the rat­tan cane over the prison cell. And that’s my point. Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is bet­ter. What does that say about prison?

All in all, a phe­nom­e­nal essay.

On a relat­ed note, you should read my thoughts on the per­va­sive insan­i­ty of pro­fes­sors.

Conversations

Three recent con­ver­sa­tions, pre­sent­ed ver­ba­tim:

Domino

A Con­ver­sa­tion With My Daugh­ter
I set up a line of domi­noes run­ning around a cor­ner and had my sev­en-year-old daugh­ter sit where she could only see the end. I tipped the first domi­no over and we watched the entire chain fall.

Then I asked her, “How do you know there was a first domi­no? You did­n’t see it.”

She stared at the fall­en domi­noes with a fur­rowed brow for a few sec­onds, then said, “If there was no first domi­no there would be no world. Noth­ing could exist.”

Look out, Aris­to­tle. My daugh­ter is gun­ning for you.

new face
A Con­ver­sa­tion With My Son
Yes­ter­day I took my chil­dren to Hap­py Hol­low. As we were enter­ing the park we passed by an Asian gal dressed up as an ani­me char­ac­ter. I’m not sure which one, but she had on some sort of bulky white body armor. More to the point, she had also dyed her hair pur­ple.

So I said to my wife, “If I was Asian I would total­ly have pur­ple hair.”

My four-year-old son over­heard and said with a dis­mis­sive tone, “If I was Asian I’d have black hair.”

kiwanja_palo_alto_texting_3
A Con­ver­sa­tion With A Stu­dent
A text mes­sage con­ver­sa­tion with one of my stu­dents (ver­ba­tim with a few words removed to pre­serve anonymi­ty):

Stu­dent: “Is pub­lic nudi­ty a sin?”
Me: “What?”
Stu­dent: “Is it just kind of weird or is it some­thing to avoid alto­geth­er?”
Me: “Search biblegateway.com for the term ‘mod­est’.”

One Of The Most Revolutionary Thoughts I Have Read

Papyrus in Greek regarding tax issues (3rd ca. BC.)It does­n’t hap­pen too often, but every once in a while I become aware of some new piece of data that explodes what I think I know about some area I’m inter­est­ed in. New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar (and fel­low Pen­te­costal) Lar­ry Hur­ta­do just dropped a bomb on me.

In his blog post How Long Were Man­u­scripts Used? he men­tions some­thing that had nev­er occurred to me before. Not even a lit­tle bit.

One mat­ter Hous­ton address­es is how long man­u­scripts appear to have been in use. On the basis of man­u­scripts from Oxyrhynchus and from Her­cu­la­neum in par­tic­u­lar, Hous­ton notes numer­ous exam­ples of man­u­scripts dis­card­ed when they were ca. 2–3 cen­turies old. Over­all, he judges that the evi­dence indi­cates “a use­ful life of between one hun­dred and two hun­dred years for a major­i­ty of the vol­umes, with a sig­nif­i­cant minor­i­ty last­ing two hun­dred years or more” (p. 251). And, as he notes, the evi­dence from Qum­ran leads to a sim­i­lar view.

This is of poten­tial rel­e­vance for ques­tions about the trans­mis­sion of ear­ly Chris­t­ian texts, espe­cial­ly those that became part of the NT. If ear­ly copies were intact for some­thing approach­ing a cen­tu­ry or more, then this could be a fac­tor against notions that these texts were high­ly unsta­ble and sus­cep­ti­ble to major revi­sion in the course of trans­mis­sion. But we might adjust our think­ing to allow for an ear­li­er wear­ing-out of NT man­u­scripts through greater fre­quen­cy of usage. OK. Let’s sup­pose that ear­ly man­u­scripts of NT writ­ings typ­i­cal­ly wore out soon­er: twice as fast (ca. 50–75 years)? That still means that the man­u­scripts from which copies were made remained avail­able for poten­tial check­ing for a fair peri­od of time.

This prob­a­bly means noth­ing to most of you, but this is huge if you’re inter­est­ed in the tex­tu­al reli­a­bil­i­ty of the New Tes­ta­ment. This is sur­pris­ing and strong evi­dence in the “Bible is reli­able” col­umn. Check out his com­ments sec­tion where Dr. Hur­ta­do unpacks this a bit more.

Some­thing Dr. Hur­ta­do does not men­tion is that this makes it plau­si­ble that our ear­li­est papyrus frag­ments (such as P52 or one of the hand­ful of oth­ers from the mid-sec­ond cen­tu­ry) might actu­al­ly be direct copies from the auto­graph or only one gen­er­a­tion removed. It’s impos­si­ble to know, of course. But the mere fact that we can even think it plau­si­ble is mind-bog­gling.

Dr. Hur­ta­do got this data from UNC’s George W. Hous­ton in his arti­cle “Papy­ro­log­i­cal Evi­dence for Book Col­lec­tions and Libraries in the Roman Empire,” in Ancient Lit­era­cies: The Cul­ture of Read­ing in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. John­son and Holt N. Park­er (Oxford/New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2009), 233–67.

Poisonous Rat-Duck Day

PlatypusToday is Ground­hog Day, which is hilar­i­ous to me. How did they out­ma­neu­ver the oth­er ani­mals and get their own hol­i­day?

I per­son­al­ly would pre­fer Platy­pus Day. There’s an ani­mal that deserves to be cel­e­brat­ed. It’s a fur­ry, poi­so­nous rat-duck. A platy­pus is prac­ti­cal­ly a liv­ing Poké­mon.

But some­how the ground­hogs won out. I sus­pect bribery.

For the record, today I will hon­or platypi in my heart. Although Wikipedia tells me that platypi is incor­rect and I should say platy­pus­es or platy­podes. Also, they are ven­omous and not poi­so­nous (ven­om is inject­ed, poi­son is con­sumed).

To which I say: poi­so­nous rat-duck sounds bet­ter than ven­omous rat-duck, and platypi has a sat­is­fy­ing faux-intel­lec­tu­al ring to it. Let rhetoric pre­vail, and let the poi­so­nous rat-ducks have their day on the cal­en­dar!

Commentary Review: Blomberg & Kamell on James

I recent­ly received a review copy of the Zon­der­van Exeget­i­cal Com­men­tary on James by Craig Blomberg and Mari­am Kamell.

I was par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed to receive this book for two rea­sons:

So here’s my take on the com­men­tary:

  1. It’s nice and short. This is a plus, not a minus. Too many com­men­taries today run to the thou­sands of pages. This vol­ume is long enough to help­ful­ly explain puz­zling aspects of the text with­out being so mas­sive that the cen­tral mes­sage gets lost.
  2. It pays atten­tion to usabil­i­ty. For exam­ple: the com­men­tary on each verse is pre­ced­ed by a bold­ed Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the verse fol­lowed by the Greek text. Con­trast this with most com­men­taries that seem to assume you’ve got three or four books open on your desk (or win­dows on your mon­i­tor) at once (view the expla­na­tion of James 1:2 to see what I mean).
  3. It keeps you ori­ent­ed. Every sec­tion begins with an out­line of the sur­round­ing text and an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly clear gram­mat­i­cal out­line that makes the author’s argu­ment clear. You can see a sam­ple page at Google Books (click that link — seri­ous­ly).
  4. The com­men­tary ends with a very help­ful sum­ma­ry of the over­all the­ol­o­gy of the book of James — some­thing I wish more com­men­taries did. The dis­ci­pline of Bib­li­cal the­ol­o­gy would be much rich­er if that were the case.
  5. It uses foot­notes. Yay!
  6. I dug into some of the more puz­zling vers­es in James and thought that Blomberg & Kamell explained them with clar­i­ty and wis­dom. Dis­claimer: I have not read this com­men­tary all the way through.

Over­all, I rec­om­mend this com­men­tary if you need to preach or teach on James any­time soon and urge you to look care­ful­ly at the oth­er vol­umes in the series as reviews on them become avail­able (the linked web­site — bestcommentaries.com — is, in my opin­ion, the best place to begin search­ing for a com­men­tary).

Thanks for the free­bie, Zon­der­van! I would have told the truth if your com­men­tary was lack­lus­ter, but I am delight­ed to report that this is a sol­id expo­si­tion of the book of James.

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.