Quantum Test Difficulty Rating | University of Toronto Physical Chemistry Course

In summary: I don't know what your time-constraints were. They're not necessarily easy either though. The thing about QM is that there's a lot of tedious math, so a lot of people get put off by the up front difficulty. Just by eyeballing it, I saw 45 points that were purely algebra in that all of the relevant information for a simple substitution was given already. That's a fairly short test too. When I took intro QM, the test was several pages with 5-10 parts each.Final verdict: On the easy side of average but for a second year class the test could be considered hard.

How hard did you find this test? (Link is below)

  • Hard

    Votes: 1 2.7%
  • Average

    Votes: 17 45.9%
  • Easy

    Votes: 13 35.1%
  • Can't say...

    Votes: 6 16.2%

  • Total voters
    37
  • #1
Howers
447
5
For those of you who may remember me, I had a terrible term test result for my quantum mechanics test due to a lack of study. Well, my second term was today and I feel it farred even worse, despite actually studying properly. I'm talking in the range of 30%... I have come to a realization I may not be physics material, because quantum physics is my an integral part of my field. If I can't get around a second year course, I have to face facts and choose not to pursue physical chemistry.

The alternative, which I think unlikely, is that the test was too difficult. This opinion was shared by some of my friends. I have uploaded the test for you to view and decide. I sincerely ask that you be brutally honest when rating the difficulty. I don't want "feel-good" or uplifting messages, just think back to your introductory quantum/modern physics course and measure it relative to that. The test was one hour.

About the course? Its a second year physical chemistry course at University of Toronto with two terms, the first being thermal and now being the quantum. Its equivalent to a modern physics (aka introductory course in quantum physics). The link to the test is found below. Please tell me what you think, as well as what school you go to and how it compares to what you did in second year quantum. Thank you in advance.


TEST: http://i29.tinypic.com/2il1z45.jpg
 
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  • #2
The thing about QM is that there's a lot of tedious math, so a lot of people get put off by the up front difficulty. Just by eyeballing it, I saw 45 points that were purely algebra in that all of the relevant information for a simple substitution was given already. That's a fairly short test too. When I took intro QM, the test was several pages with 5-10 parts each.

Final verdict: On the easy side of average but for a second year class the test could be considered hard.
 
  • #3
Now, I am a physics major and don't know what is usually covered in a chemistry-based quantum mechanics course. Going off of my experience in a physics Quantum Mechanics course, these problems seem above-average for a second year (200 Level) course. They are probably average for an upper level undergraduate Quantum Mechanics course They do not seem impossible, but then again I do not know what your time-constraints were. They're not necessarily easy either though.
 
  • #4
jhicks said:
The thing about QM is that there's a lot of tedious math, so a lot of people get put off by the up front difficulty. Just by eyeballing it, I saw 45 points that were purely algebra in that all of the relevant information for a simple substitution was given already. That's a fairly short test too. When I took intro QM, the test was several pages with 5-10 parts each.

Final verdict: On the easy side of average but for a second year class the test could be considered hard.

Its an hour long test. Keep in mind we don't know differential equations yet. I didn't find any simple substitutions.

G01 said:
Now, I am a physics major and don't know what is usually covered in a chemistry-based quantum mechanics course. Going off of my experience in a physics Quantum Mechanics course, these problems seem above-average for a second year (200 Level) course. They are probably average for an upper level undergraduate Quantum Mechanics course They do not seem impossible, but then again I do not know what your time-constraints were. They're not necessarily easy either though.

Not sure what your saying... that they are more suitable for 3rd year or advanced 2nd year?
 
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  • #5
Honestly, these are the some of the easiest problems in quantum chemistry. I know because I'm a physical chemistry major graduate student.
 
  • #6
scarecrow said:
Honestly, these are the some of the easiest problems in quantum chemistry. I know because I'm a physical chemistry major graduate student.

Alright, just don't say it in retrospect. I could easily laugh at people doing mechanics in first year, but I remember it was a pain when first exposed to it especially w/o any calculus. This is a first exposure to quantum done in second year, unlike a lot of other chemists who take their first course in 3rd year. If you found this easy in second year, I appretiate your input.
 
  • #7
Howers said:
Not sure what your saying... that they are more suitable for 3rd year or advanced 2nd year?

Well, again, I am also looking in retrospect somewhat from the point of view of a physics major. The problems are harder than what I had in my sophomore Modern Physics course, but like I said, I do not know what is expected in a sophomore Physical Chemistry course. (Also my professor for modern was not the most difficult professor at my university.)

I can do the problems now, since I am in a 300 level Quantum Mechanics course, but I don't think I could have done them while I was a sophomore in Modern. That's about all I can say, since I have not taken any P Chem courses, and do not know what is required.
 
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  • #8
Howers said:
I sincerely ask that you be brutally honest when rating the difficulty. I don't want "feel-good" or uplifting messages, just think back to your introductory quantum course and measure it relative to that.
i did that.
 
  • #9
G01 said:
Now, I am a physics major and don't know what is usually covered in a chemistry-based quantum mechanics course. Going off of my experience in a physics Quantum Mechanics course, these problems seem above-average for a second year (200 Level) course. They are probably average for an upper level undergraduate Quantum Mechanics course They do not seem impossible, but then again I do not know what your time-constraints were. They're not necessarily easy either though.

This is about what I thought, too. These questions are close to representative of first quarter, first test upper-division quantum. I took P-Chem and the questions were about this hard, but that's an upper level course.

Seems it would be a bit tough if you haven't had differential equations yet :cry: !

I cringed when I read, "From the lecture..." Arg! I hated test questions from the lectures!
 
  • #10
well I said average, however after reading your description of the course I'd say above average, the questions are pretty simple in the end, but I'd say the time constraint is a bit hefty.

if you note they gave you the solutions to all of the problems in the test, the only thing they didn't mention was the ground state of the harmonic oscillator, which I imagine you could have written down, or memorized relatively quickly
 
  • #11
I did this stuff last quarter. It's not too bad. Most of it was just plug and chug.

jhicks said:
The thing about QM is that there's a lot of tedious math

Not once you learn Dirac notation.
 
  • #12
G01 said:
Well, again, I am also looking in retrospect somewhat from the point of view of a physics major. The problems are harder than what I had in my sophomore Modern Physics course, but like I said, I do not know what is expected in a sophomore Physical Chemistry course. (Also my professor for modern was not the most difficult professor at my university.)

I can do the problems now, since I am in a 300 level Quantum Mechanics course, but I don't think I could have done them while I was a sophomore in Modern. That's about all I can say, since I have not taken any P Chem courses, and do not know what is required.

Its supposed to be virtually the same as modern physics, altho "less rigorous".

scarecrow said:
i did that.
Thank you, that is what I requested. Its just you said you were a grad p-chem student... and I imagine by then this stuff will seem second nature. But if you found this kind of stuff easy in second year undergrad, I guess this reflects my poorer ability.


CPL.Luke said:
well I said average, however after reading your description of the course I'd say above average, the questions are pretty simple in the end, but I'd say the time constraint is a bit hefty.

if you note they gave you the solutions to all of the problems in the test, the only thing they didn't mention was the ground state of the harmonic oscillator, which I imagine you could have written down, or memorized relatively quickly
I didn't find anything on that test relatively simple... aside from 3b. The prof said don't memorize anything... so we didn't.

I thank all the posters for the input. I'm afraid its just reflecting my ability. Its better to know sooner than later. I'll definitely discuss changing majors with my profs when I get my results. Its clear if I'm weak in quantum I shouldn't be doing p-chem. I could always do this stuff on my own.
 
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  • #13
I have a PhD in physics, but haven't done an NRQM problem since I took the class, 20 years ago. Wait...not quite true - I did one for a lecture 5 or 6 years back. It took me about 10 minutes to do the test; 3 minutes for 1 and 2, and the remainder for 3, with 3a taking longer than 3b.

I think all the problems were quite straightforward - "show me how to get from A to B". This doesn't require you to figure out B from A on your own. I would expect that a student who had a strong understanding of the material covered in the exam (and of course, I can't say how this related to material covered in class) would do well, even if that student was not adept at tedious computations.

I don't see that this test requires differential equations. It does require one to know how to take the derivative of a product.

I think it does require the student to really understand similar derivations. Nodding "uh huh" and "that makes sense" to oneself as the professor does the derivation will not be enough to get a high score on this test. One needs to be able to do the in-class derivations on ones own to score well here. Then the student has a real shot of knowing how to best set things up. For example, in problem 1, the first step is to reorder the Hamiltonian into {[things involving x] + [things involving y]}. Then the problem falls right apart.
 
  • #14
Well, ****. This isn't exactly relevant, but this proves to me that the physics program at my school isn't going to do me any good, and that I'm definitely going to have to continue my undergraduate education at another school after I finish my math degree if I am to have any hope of going to grad school for physics.

I'm literally at the top of my quantum class (a first year higher level quantum course, which seems to cover similar material; we're using the Griffiths book, and we just finished chapter 2) with a total score of over 100%, and I only have some vague ideas as to how to approach these problems. All we ever do is normalize wave functions and find expectation values. Maybe play with Ehrenfest's theorem or transmission/reflection coefficients.

Well, I voted "Can't Say."
 
  • #15
Mathmaniac, Do you mean first year higher level QM course as in First year of undergrad course? If so ... what sort of physics program covers QM in a first year course?

Bu you say first year higher level QM class, so are you just advanced an are enrolled in a harder class as a first year?

To the OP,
Take heed to Vanadium's post as far as what skills were needed on the questions. You are not solving the DE's as the solution is given to you. The prof. is saying here is a solution to this EQ, show me that it is indeed a solution? If that isn't making sense then I would question what the pre-reqs are in math for the class you are in.
 
  • #16
mgiddy911 said:
Mathmaniac, Do you mean first year higher level QM course as in First year of undergrad course? If so ... what sort of physics program covers QM in a first year course?

Bu you say first year higher level QM class, so are you just advanced an are enrolled in a harder class as a first year?

To the OP,
Take heed to Vanadium's post as far as what skills were needed on the questions. You are not solving the DE's as the solution is given to you. The prof. is saying here is a solution to this EQ, show me that it is indeed a solution? If that isn't making sense then I would question what the pre-reqs are in math for the class you are in.

The last thing I will do is listen to a PhD student who has seen this stuff over and over for 8+ consecutive years, in addition to working with it on a daily basis. Such people have their minds warped when it comes to difficulty of subjects, because they can't revert back to a time when they never had all their intutions. I know this because of the many TAs I've talked with... one was shocked I didn't know what a line integral was when asking him about dot products back in first year...
 
  • #17
If you are referring to me, I am no PHD student, just a lowly second year undergrad.
My experience in QM comes fro a Modern Physics class where we did simple solutions to the SE and anything else just from side readings and this forum. However I will say that I have an above average knowledge of maths for someone in my year ( at least at my school ) because I started out head in math.

I'm sorry if my post sounded condescending. I guess I really didn't mean to question your mathematical ability though that is what I did essentially.
Could you post a bit more about what you are not understanding on the test? One thin I can do is explain the simpler parts that are just asking to show that the given solution really is a solution. For the rest I'd have to brush up a bit because I haven't seen/ used any QM this semester at all and will not take a formal class in it until Senior year due to study abroad conflicts.
 
  • #18
You really shouldn't be asking people here if they think the test was hard. Short of everyone going Daaaaamn, that's a brutal test. I couldn't even do it now, let alone in second year., you're not going to get a consensus on it. I could tell you that it looks fairly fair to me, as I think at that point in second year I was pretty much fully comfortable with derivatives and partial derivatives, but maybe swapping out momentum operators with their respective derivatives would still have been on shaky ground; I don't know.

The people who you ought to ask are your classmates. What was the average on the test? The standard deviation? If everyone you know who took the test thought it was hard, then it was probably a hard test for you guys, or none of you were prepared for a test like that. The midterm in my advanced quantum class this semester was fairly easy but I think most of us botched it because it was not the abstract formalism we had been expecting but an actual applied problem that we hadn't refamiliarized ourselves with the notation, etc, enough to not suck on the test.

In any event, there's no reason to give up yet. Unless everyone in the class is doing remarkably better than you you'll probably pull through just fine (perhaps not with as high a grade as you had hoped for, depending on how the prof assigns grades at the end). Plus, things that seem to bowl you over now will likely become quite familiar later, and one day if someone asks you if you think their quantum test was fair you'll probably look at it and think "That doesn't look too bad...".
 
  • #19
mgiddy911 said:
Mathmaniac, Do you mean first year higher level QM course as in First year of undergrad course? If so ... what sort of physics program covers QM in a first year course?

Bu you say first year higher level QM class, so are you just advanced an are enrolled in a harder class as a first year?

Nah, I mean like, a first semester of QM. Like QM I, only it's just called QM here because there's only one semester of QM offered here.

I think though, on further inspection, I'd have a good shot at answering some of those. I'm was a bit confused by the wording of the questions.
 
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  • #20
This is comparable (although a little bit harder) to the material that I had covered in my intro to Modern Physics course (which I took as a Freshman, but most others at my school take as a sophomore). Now that I've taken two more full courses in QM (covering everything at the Griffith's level), these questions are easy peasy. As stated earlier, these problems do not require any knowledge of differential equations, although a knowledge up to an equivalent of calc 3 would be useful.
 
  • #21
I got 82% on it.

Class average was 62%.

WHAT THE HELL?
 
  • #22
why in the world did you bump this thread?
 
  • #23
To show people that even an idiot can ace a test.
 
  • #24
scarecrow said:
Honestly, these are the some of the easiest problems in quantum chemistry. I know because I'm a physical chemistry major graduate student.

I also thought that this test was ridiculously easy. However, I'm a physics graduate student (I'm also finishing up my second semester of graduate quantum right now), so it's expected that I should be able to do these problems. So this really begs the question: for whom is this test written? If it's for a graduate level class, then it's child's play. If it's for an advanced (i.e. fourth year) undergrad physics class, it's at the right level. If it's for a sophomore quantum class, it's way too hard. And if it's for chemistry students...well, then I don't know how to calibrate that scale.
 
  • #25
arunma said:
I also thought that this test was ridiculously easy. However, I'm a physics graduate student (I'm also finishing up my second semester of graduate quantum right now), so it's expected that I should be able to do these problems. So this really begs the question: for whom is this test written? If it's for a graduate level class, then it's child's play. If it's for an advanced (i.e. fourth year) undergrad physics class, it's at the right level. If it's for a sophomore quantum class, it's way too hard. And if it's for chemistry students...well, then I don't know how to calibrate that scale.

I disagree, I just finished a 4th year quantum class, and I consider that test really easy. It is on the level perhaps of a second year course, but even in second year our tests were much much harder. Mind you our second year average in quantum was 32% I believe.
 

1. What is the purpose of the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating?

The Quantum Test Difficulty Rating is used to measure the difficulty level of exams in the University of Toronto's Physical Chemistry course. It helps students understand the level of complexity of the exam and prepare accordingly.

2. How is the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating calculated?

The Quantum Test Difficulty Rating is calculated based on a combination of factors including the complexity of the concepts covered, the length of the exam, and the difficulty of the questions. It is then assigned a rating on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being the easiest and 5 being the most difficult.

3. Is the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating accurate?

The Quantum Test Difficulty Rating is an estimation based on various factors and may vary from student to student. However, it is a helpful tool to gauge the level of difficulty and prepare for the exam accordingly.

4. How can the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating be used to prepare for the exam?

The Quantum Test Difficulty Rating can be used to guide study efforts by identifying areas that may require more attention. For example, a higher difficulty rating may indicate a need for more in-depth understanding and practice in certain concepts.

5. Is the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating the only factor in determining exam performance?

No, the Quantum Test Difficulty Rating is just one factor that may affect exam performance. Other factors such as study habits, test-taking strategies, and overall understanding of the material also play a significant role.

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