Are physicists looked down upon if

[Stingray]

Referring to the original posts in this thread, getting a C+ in intro physics is very bad for a physics major. Unless someone didn't try at all (and will change in the future) or had an unusually difficult course, those courses should be easy. Later ones are almost always far more difficult, and require one to understand the freshman material very well to get anywhere at all.

 

[mathwonk]

at the risk of muddying the water further, i want to give my viewpoint as a prof, who actively looks for talented students. We always notice a talented student in our classes, and we are so excited to find a talented stduent that works hard and is willing to take instruction, and strive to be good, that we begin to shepherd their careers immediately from that point.

This year I had a C student who sent me an email asking a really beautiful question and giving his own very insightful answer. This one event immediately put this previously invisible student on my radar, and I told the whole faculty about it. I especially notified the honors counselor and inquired who this guy was. I found some of his friends who were in the honors program and who said he had been with them in high school and should have been in honors at uni too.

So I gave him the name of the honors advisor and told him to make an appointment. Now I do not know if he did, but if he shows even this much responsiveness, we will transform his university experience.

Another time in a freshman seminar I had a bright student, and I immediately got him into the honors section of calc, or a more advanced course, where he began to make a name for himself. He came up for admission to grad school last month and I recognized his name and told my stories about him, and how he ahd impressed me. others had similar stories about him, and he was immediatey included in the accepted pool.

So although grades do matter and reflect both ability and hard work, the real advantage is to make an impression on a professor. This can be done by showing remarkable ability and talent, but also from unusual stamina and determination. Almost all the grades in an applicant stack for grad school are high. We need to know which ones mean something and which are fake.

Every year I have students who drop my class for an easier class where their grade will be higher but they will learn less. These students go on my list of infamous underachievers immediately and I am uninclined to recommend them for anything. some of these students have carefully preserved 4.0's.

The real difference in geting or not getting a job is in the impression you make on people who write the recommendations, and who give out the jobs.

I used to travel extensively to conferences, both to hear the talks (and give them), and to find out who the promising young people were. I never read their resumes, I just talked to them and listened to them speak. In that situation I do not eve care what other people say abut them. I believe my own ears more. I have identified very outstanding people this way early in their career even though other experts had told me they were unimpressed.

Regardless of your resume, unless you have a deep understanding of your subject, and can convey that personally to other people, you will not get an academic job. And if you do have that and can do that you will never be without one, at least as long as jobs are available as they are now.

As an example of admission to grad school, I would recommed Hurkyl for our PhD program if he were interested, without looking at his transcript, just based on reading his posts.

 

[Quaoar]

Frankly I'm getting a little sick of Cyrus' elitist attitude towards colleges. There are MANY ways of passing information to others, and until Cyrus shows me some study that conclusively proves that a hard-ass homework policy produces better scholars, I'm going to completely ignore his "your college must suck" comments.

I had some good professors, some mediocre professors, and some awful professors when I went to college. Apparently I didn't "get my money's worth" from the professor I had who didn't even assign homework, but gave lectures that blew all the other professors out of the water. I believe I earned a B-range grade in that class, but that was because he expected so much out of us and the tests were very hard.

Which brings me to another issue: Ease of the course. If you have a hard-line professor who enforces solid percentages and doesn't curve the class, you HAVE to reduce the difficulty of the class to ensure a certain number of students will pass it. If the school allows the professor to fail most of their students, word of mouth will kill enrollment for that professor's class the next time he teaches it. I've seen it happen. I've had some classes where the mean score on the final was in the 30% range because the questions were so difficult. But that's not a bad thing, because it challenges the students. It seems to me that Cyrus frowns on any system that isn't carved in rock.

Frankly, I believe it's fine to have some professors with a more rigid grading policy, if that's what they believe will motivate the students to do well. But to make idiotic comments that a college must suck because the homework isn't given a set weight is very, very closed-minded.

 

[mathwonk]

your comment about having to insure a certain rate passing so the students will take the class, however shows the low point to which the us system has sunk.

this is indeed true at many schools, including mine, but it is a sign of disease in the system. when the stduents determine what level the course is taught at, things are upside down, and cyrus, although somewhat undiplomatically blunt about it, is at least partly right there.

this phenomenon is a result of the market system in the US, where education isa commodity, bought and sold and subject to supply and demand. if education were free, and there were a competition for the best slots, we could make a more careful selection of students and hold them to higher standards.

to some extent this is happening at UGA, because of the HOPE scholarship. I never realized it before, but this is a big plus for this scholarship. It makes us more in control of the standard of education. When the parents and students are paying more for it they can insist the quality be lowered and they often do so.

 

[JSBeckton]

At the end of the day, grades are very important for your first job only. If you get good grades but do poorly at your first job, you will suffer. If you get bad grades but excel at your first job you will prosper. Either way you will end up where you belong.

If I interviewed someone who had poor grades but was obviously very inteligent I would come to one conclusion.... this person is probabaly lazy.

I would probabaly rather hire someone with average grades that's working as hard as they can before hiring a genius with average grades that's not giving it his all.

What did Einstien say? Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, something like that?

 

[Quaoar]

My argument is mainly that a professor can CHOOSE to grade however he wishes, but people should not generalize and say that only one way works. If a professor thinks that being hyper-strict will work better, fine. If he wants to take a more relaxed attitude, that's fine too. There's no definitive proof that one method works better than the other.

 

[Kurdt]

What did Einstien say? Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, something like that?

I'm pretty sure that was Edison but either way it still applies.

 

[JSBeckton]

I'm pretty sure that was Edison but either way it still applies.

Edison, Einstein, Peyton Manning........whoever the kids look up to these days.

 

[morphism]

This is the most ridiculous grading procedure I ever heard of. What you are saying is that if I'm taking a course on Quantum Physics and We have a homework assignment on the photo-electric effect worth 10% and I get a 10/10 on it I could sit back the rest of the semester and do nothing. I wouldn't have proved that I know ANYTHING about The Schroedinger Equation, Wave functions, Probablility Densities, Expectation Values, Operator Notation, etc, etc.

Yet, I will get an perfect A in the course because on that one homework assignment I knew how to use the formula E=hf.

I'm sorry. I agree with Cyrus. The guy did not do the work that he KNEW was required for the course. He deserved the F. I don't care if he was the Reincarnation of Einstein, he deserved the F.

That's not what I said at all.

If you did the assignment, you will get that 10%. If you didn't, your final course grade will suffer -10%. What's so unfamiliar about this?

What I was arguing about is that if you do not do 35% of the course material, yet still manage to do 60%, you are entitled to that 60%.

Now:

3) If you're in a class, do what the instructor tells you that is part of the class, even if you think it is "easy and stupid". If it is easy and stupid, then it is quickly done, no ? And if it isn't, after all, so easy and stupid, then you made a judgment error.

Not necessarily. Some assignments, especially in computer science, require a LOT of work and yet they remain unchallenging what-so-ever. Sometimes you're even spoon-fed the algorithms and all that remains is the (usually tedious) task of writing the code. This could take up time that would be put to better use on some other course.

 

[mathwonk]

heres an example of a homework problem i gave once. there was a certain polynomial depending on a parameter t in the book, irreducible for all t, but the polynomial was singular for t = 0.

So i asked the class to compute in detail the resolutions of the singularities at t = 0, and their contribution to the genus, and finally compute the genus directly.

One student figured out a clever way to avoid doing all the computation I told him to do, using the irreducibility of the polynomial, and some other facts we knew. He felt very clever avoiding all the useless busy work i had given him.

The only thing is, the book had a mistake in it. the polynomial really was not irreducible, and if he had done what I told him to he would have disovered that fact as his genus computation would have come out negative.

The purpose of my exercise was for him to discover that the book was wrong, and the value of doing explicit computation for oneself. But he thought he knew better than me what was useful spending his time on.

It is interesting that some students think they are better judges of the value of the work I assign than I am, after 40 years of teaching.

 

[chroot]

I got to say, mathwonk, that I disagree with your methods.

First, students expect textbooks to be correct, at least in the pages or sections the instructor has them use for reference. It's not really fair to expect a student to be able to find mistakes in his own textbook, as he's learning the material. He's going to presume that his instructor has read that section, and given it his blessing.

Second, students are generally rewarded for doing their reading and finding a simple and elegant way to solve a problem. You complain pretty much constantly about how your students are stupid and don't read or try to really understand the material. You complain about how they just try to do the grunt work and get a good grade, and don't care about depth. Now you're insulting the poor kid for trying to do exactly what you claim to want him to do, even if he (gasp) didn't catch an error in his textbook in the process.

I think everyone else is right: your posts are absolutely full of contradictions and illogical conclusions. I, for one, would be appalled to have you teaching anyone I know.

- Warren

 

[mathwonk]

I did not intend to trick them. i told them exactly how to proceed so as to discover the error. I asked them to carry out several explicit steps, then i asked what do you notice? I expected them to do what I said and find the error, and be amused by it. I was surprized when my student avoided doing what I told him to do.

I was impressed by his cleverness but puzzled that he thought it unnecessary to follow my directions. I wanted them to have the pleasure of discovering an error in a famous book by a world expert.

toelarn to be a researcher you cannot afford to assume anything is correct. you need to learn to verify things for yourself. You also need to learn that your own professor is often more reliable than your textbook. that is another thing that puzzles me. When students assume the textbook author is more authoritative than the professor.

but nothing is as reliable as checking it yourself.

but maybe it was a bad idea.

 

[Cyrus]

But typically texbooks are supposed to be reviewed by two to three pages of lists of professors from other universities for consistency. Open the cover of your book, and you will see the list I am talking about.

 

[mathwonk]

In math at least, there are several levels of textbooks. the best are written by real experts, and those books are the best ones for the best students.

Nowadays these books are only used at the top schools, and even those do not always use them. Student preparation has deteriorated the level where those books are considered too hard.

the next level of textbooks are written by average mathematics professors at colleges and universities, not the most famous, since those have no time for textbook writing, with rare exceptions. Some of these authors are no longer doing research.

Thus at many universities, they use books which are written by people who are no more expert than the research professors teaching the courses, often less so.

Even at harvard, they often use books written by people who are much less expert than essentially all the professors teaching there.

The courses are taught by active researchers, people who are often more active than the authors of the books they are obliged to use. These elementary books do often have review committees of professors of various levels of expertise, often not outstanding, written in the front.

Those reviewers are usually chosen to review the book for suitability for teaching to ordinary classes. the more profesors who say "yes my students can use this book profitably", the more likely the publisher is to make money. Even if they also review for mistakes they seldom catch them all.

More advanced books usually do not have these lists of names, and are not reviewed in the same way.

The book i was discussing was the classic work "Algebraic Curves" by Robert J Walker, republished by Dover, from the Princeton University press edition. the error is on page 74, section 7.1.

When a famous expert like this writes a book, it is rare to find any list of reviewers in the front, and indeed this book does not have any. I am nowhere near the expert Dr Walker was, nonetheless I noticed the error.

I would not expect a student to discover this error alone, (largely because stusents are in the habit of blindly believing what books say) and that is why I designed a set of exercises which, if worked as assigned, and without assuming anything not stated in the exercise, would reveal the error.

I assumed a diligent student would be willing to go through the computations needed to verify for himself the result that our formulas predicted.

The kicker was that the result of the computation contradicted the prediction of our formulas, and should have caused some puzzlement for the student.

(In the exercise I did not say the equation was irreducible, since it wasn't. The error was in the book, not in my exercise. There was no need to read the book to do my exercise. If one decided to skip the steps I gave and use the books false statements instead, that's when one got the wrong answer.

In a later post in the who wants to be a mathematician thread, I will give an other such exercise for the curious; fair warning to those who are appalled by questions which are not trivial or obvious, and require thought.

 

[chroot]

You also need to learn that your own professor is often more reliable than your textbook... I am nowhere near the expert Dr Walker was

Another inconsistency to add to the list: If you freely admit that you're nowhere near the expert who wrote the book, why do you get incensed that your students would be more likely to trust the book than you, the dope who got kicked out of undergraduate school?

It seems to me that you have a pathological desire to hold your students to standards that you yourself never met.

- Warren

 

[G01]

Ahh Morphism, I see I see. But still if he didn't do 35% of the work and only got a 65% then shouldn't that still be an F? I guess it depends on the school and the professor.

 

[mathwonk]

lets see, I'm a dope, pathological,... .

Why do i threaten you so much Warren? Or are you just off your anger management medication?

 

[TMFKAN64]

Look, if the kid's a genius, getting an F because he didn't do the homework doesn't really matter. If he's not a genius, someday, an employer is going to ask him to do something that isn't terribly interesting but nevertheless needs to be done. It's better to weed out those unwilling to follow instructions sooner rather than later.

 

[TMFKAN64]

I blame the holidays for making everyone insane.

 

[imastud]

as a physics student, i can say that i personally have put my grades ahead of my understanding of the material all throughout school. you can always go back and learn the material later, but you only have one chance to get a good grade.

also, why would a prof think higher of a B or C student that came up with a "creative solution" to a problem, over an A student who did it the conventional way? sure they may have more talent, but they can't even meet the requirements of the class.

 

[TMFKAN64]

why would a prof think higher of a B or C student that came up with a "creative solution" to a problem, over an A student who did it the conventional way? sure they may have more talent, but they can't even meet the requirements of the class.

There is a big difference between a potential research scientist and a potential engineer.

(And I say that as an engineer... )

 

[SticksandStones]

also, why would a prof think higher of a B or C student that came up with a "creative solution" to a problem, over an A student who did it the conventional way? sure they may have more talent, but they can't even meet the requirements of the class.

Because a creative solution may be better than the conventional way?

Why do we need an assembly line when the conventional method has worked fine for hundreds of years? Why have a printing press when a scribe can copy it fine?

Anybody can replicate the steps already proven to work, it takes talent to discover something on one's own.

 

[mathwonk]

lets see. i think i do see a better way to ask my exercise next time though. I could ask them to use the remarks in the book, and the formula used by the clever kid, to do the deduction first. Then I could ask them next to check the result manually by computing the analysis of the individual singularities, and compare the answers.

That way they would get the same surprize, but a kid who thought it useless to redo the computation by hand would still miss the point.

its just hard to read a students mind when assigning a problem. you don't say to yourself, well this kid thinks he's smarter than i am, so he's going to ignore what i said to do and do something entirely different, so i need to figure out a way to prevent that. you just take it for granted they will do what you asked.

And its not just holidays. I have noticed over many years, that no one ever agrees about how instruction should be carried out, at least not when discussing it abstractly. and the disagreements get very heated.

however when they actually go in the room and observe an instructor they almost always agree he was doing a good job. they just don't agree with the way he describes what he does.

merry xmas all, you too warren.

 

[SticksandStones]

How could the clever kid even know if his method worked correctly if he didn't test it against the conventional method?

Seems rather stupid to say "Well, I did it my way but I have no way to see whether or not I did it correctly."

 

[chroot]

Why do i threaten you so much Warren? Or are you just off your anger management medication?

You don't threaten me. It's just disgusting to see a person who failed out of undergraduate school become a professor. It's even more disgusting for that professor to turn out to be impossibly arrogant, despite his own incredible failure, and to constantly belittle his students for not doing what he himself never could. You're a piece of work. I hope your students know your history, so they can take all your advice with the grain of salt it deserves.

- Warren

 

[imastud]

Because a creative solution may be better than the conventional way?

Why do we need an assembly line when the conventional method has worked fine for hundreds of years? Why have a printing press when a scribe can copy it fine?

Anybody can replicate the steps already proven to work, it takes talent to discover something on one's own.

haha yeah i know, i just hate how profs at my school coddle these clowns who do no work and get marginal grades because they are smarter. just bitterness i guess.

 

[imastud]

You don't threaten me. It's just disgusting to see a person who failed out of undergraduate school become a professor. It's even more disgusting for that professor to turn out to be impossibly arrogant, despite his own incredible failure, and to constantly belittle his students for not doing what he himself never could. You're a piece of work. I hope your students know your history, so they can take all your advice with the grain of salt it deserves.

- Warren

dude you shouln't judge somebody on something that happened years ago. people can change. you got to have faith!

 

[chroot]

dude you shouln't judge somebody on something that happened years ago. people can change. you got to have faith!

I'm judging him on the attitudes he has towards his students today.

- Warren

 

[SticksandStones]

You don't threaten me. It's just disgusting to see a person who failed out of undergraduate school become a professor.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

People change. They learn, they grow, they develop. Why should someone who failed as an undergrad not be able to make a comeback and become a professor?

 

[Quaoar]

I'm judging him on the attitudes he has towards his students today.

It's just disgusting to see a person who failed out of undergraduate school become a professor.

Seems like your judging him on more than just his current attitude...