The Academics Thread

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[tkdguy]

He's not wrong.

[Cancer]

Quote

The interior of a drinking glass is circular in cross-section and has radius r. It contains a fluid of density rho_ F.  A cube of ice is added to the glass. The cube has an edge length L and a density rho_I.  The level of the fluid in the glass rises by a distance D when the ice is added. (You may assume for this calculation that no melting occurs.) Derive an expression for D in terms of the two densities, the radius of the glass, and the size of the cube.

 

Gotta make questions which are relevant to the student experience.

 

EDIT:

 

Quote

(Digression #1: In reality, both densities depend on temperature, and that temperature dependence is something which gets discussed in PHYS 1070 [which is the next course in the series]. Working out the actual time dependence of the melting is something that involves partial differential equations, which are taught in PHYS 2500.)

 

(Digression #2: You can find on the web a version of this question which asks what happens to the fluid level in the glass as the ice melts, and the website says that it stays constant. That is correct if the densities of ice and fluid remain constant as the melting occurs, which is not a valid assumption. You are warned.)

 

EDIT #2:

 

Quote

(Digression #0: The symbol ρ is a lower case Greek letter rho, and it is the most commonly used symbol for mass density. Confusingly, it is also the most commonly used symbol for resistivity, which we will encounter later this term when discussing electricity. Your instructor has been known to create questions where you must use both mass density and resistivity in the same equation simply because he is malicious and evil and finds this sort of thing amusing.)

 

[Cancer]

U of Vermont's administration will impose unilateral cuts and dismissals

 

... without, of course, cutting administration.

[Cancer]

Is it really true that Canvas quizzes can't handle more than four decimal digits of precision in their answers?!??

 

(reference)

 

What decayed, nonsentient abortion of a jackal's tapeworm made that design decision?

[Michael Hopcroft]

On 11/28/2020 at 10:49 PM, Cancer said:

VSH is my personal notation indicating clear, prosecutable academic dishonesty.  Plagiarism in a paper, copying on an exam, fabrication of data on a lab.  It stands for "Vehement suspicion of heresy", which is the charge on which Galileo was tried, and was sentenced "to be shown the instruments of torture as if they were to be used."

And what happens to the student who turns in that paper, exam, or lab?

 

I'm reminded of Animal House.  Delta's downfall, IIRC, was a massive project to steal exams so their members can cheat on them. Dean Wormer punished them severely, but possibly not severely enough. These guys were throwing away their chance to gain any benefit from going to college because they preferred to party and start food fights. In making Dean Wormer and the Deltas the heroes, they may have made a funny film but they set some really bad examples.

 

Fat, drunk, and stupid really is no way to go through life.

[Cancer]

23 minutes ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

Fat, drunk, and stupid really is no way to go through life.

 

Unless you're Senator John Blutarsky, Washington, DC.

 

Real academic dishonesty proceedings are pretty formalized, though the details vary between institutions, and the standard of proof is pretty high, and documentation must be made, retained, and copies provided to the student.  A standard punishment is to give a zero on the assignment (assuming the conclusion of dishonesty is sustained); that one a faculty member can usually assign and no one higher up the chain will care.  Assigning an F for the course is a higher bar to clear, but I have done it (once, back in the late 1990s for a two-credit summer course, where the student submitted a paper he'd downloaded -- I found it on schoolsucks.com).  I wasn't able to get anything more than the F onto the student's permanent academic record, though.

 

Stealing my exams would require physical armed robbery or burglary.  Again, back in the 1990s I had my workstation in my faculty office hacked into once.  Since then I have never kept grades on line until literally the day when I enter them into the university database of record, and until very recently I've created and edited my exams on machines that literally were never connected to the internet (all data transfer was via thumbdrive). I create static PDFs, print those off myself, and carry them in my briefcase until I give them.

 

In the virtual teaching world that started last March ... well, my experience with the final exam I gave in the middle of March to a half-dozen people led me to conclude that (1) at least half of on-line test-takers will cheat given any opportunity, (2) I haven't heard of a way to prevent such an opportunity in the on-line environment, and (3) I have to find other means to evaluate the students. 

 

EDIT: and my opinion of those who engage in academic dishonesty  is unattributed but present on-line.  "Most professors think that burning at the stake is too lenient a punishment for cheating, but they'll go along with it anyway because it is cheap and convenient."

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Cancer]

10.6 m/s, rounded to the right decimal place.

 

(EDIT: This is a weird enough problem that I might give it someday, except I more or less never teach mechanics.)

[Starlord]

9 hours ago, Logan.1179 said:

 

Is it an African or European octopus?

[Pariah]

8 hours ago, Cancer said:

(EDIT: This is a weird enough problem that I might give it someday, except I more or less never teach mechanics.)

 

But I do....

 

[Pariah]

We're going to be watching this tomorrow morning in my Astronomy class.

 

[Starlord]

9 hours ago, Pariah said:

We're going to be watching this tomorrow morning in my Astronomy class.

 

 

Is this a documentary about Johnny Depp, Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen?

[Pariah]

Not quite that weird, no.

[Cancer]

More on the physics of water rockets

[tkdguy]

16 hours ago, Pariah said:

We're going to be watching this tomorrow morning in my Astronomy class.

 

 

Great lecture! I don't often watch long videos, but this one was worth the time.

[archer]

On 12/4/2020 at 2:24 PM, Cancer said:

 

Unless you're Senator John Blutarsky, Washington, DC.

 

Real academic dishonesty proceedings are pretty formalized, though the details vary between institutions, and the standard of proof is pretty high, and documentation must be made, retained, and copies provided to the student.  A standard punishment is to give a zero on the assignment (assuming the conclusion of dishonesty is sustained); that one a faculty member can usually assign and no one higher up the chain will care.  Assigning an F for the course is a higher bar to clear, but I have done it (once, back in the late 1990s for a two-credit summer course, where the student submitted a paper he'd downloaded -- I found it on schoolsucks.com).  I wasn't able to get anything more than the F onto the student's permanent academic record, though.

 

Stealing my exams would require physical armed robbery or burglary.  Again, back in the 1990s I had my workstation in my faculty office hacked into once.  Since then I have never kept grades on line until literally the day when I enter them into the university database of record, and until very recently I've created and edited my exams on machines that literally were never connected to the internet (all data transfer was via thumbdrive). I create static PDFs, print those off myself, and carry them in my briefcase until I give them.

 

In the virtual teaching world that started last March ... well, my experience with the final exam I gave in the middle of March to a half-dozen people led me to conclude that (1) at least half of on-line test-takers will cheat given any opportunity, (2) I haven't heard of a way to prevent such an opportunity in the on-line environment, and (3) I have to find other means to evaluate the students. 

 

EDIT: and my opinion of those who engage in academic dishonesty  is unattributed but present on-line.  "Most professors think that burning at the stake is too lenient a punishment for cheating, but they'll go along with it anyway because it is cheap and convenient."

 

If they know, with a metaphysical certainty, that all the other students are cheating, it is asking too much of a student's honesty to ask them to both not cheat AND to tolerate other people getting ahead of them by cheating.

 

Tell a group of runners that they have to put rocks in their shoes then run a marathon. But that no one is going to film the race, watch the race, or check their shoes after the race to see if the rocks are inside.

 

You could decrease the importance of having a diploma in our society, decrease the importance of test grades, or eliminate test grades. But you aren't going to eliminate cheating if it looks easy to accomplish, if the students are under the impression that all the other students are cheating, and if test grades remain important.

[Pariah]

5 hours ago, tkdguy said:

Great lecture! I don't often watch long videos, but this one was worth the time.

 

The thing I really like about it is her obvious excitement for what she does. It really is nature of the universe stuff, and it's cool that she's able to convey that thrill and sense of wonder to the audience.

[Cancer]

* What are the top five grammatical/mechanics errors (sentence-level errors) you think students need to conquer?
 
(1) Excessive reliance on spell-checkers, which results in completely spurious word selections.  Sometimes these are amusing (recent examples from my class include "Smell bodies of the Solar System" and "As Jupiter's moons orbit the extremely massive gas giant, Jupiter is constantly excreting gravitational forces on its moons or small bodies.") but other times the mistakes made are inexplicable.  And, of course, spell-checkers are helpless when the student's typo happens to be a valid English word.

 

(2) Bad choices among frequently-used homonyms (there, their, they're; your, you're; etc.)

 

(3) I would like to expunge a certain frequently-used sentence construction from use.  I see the construct "Just because XXX, it doesn't mean YYY." used much too often, and most of the time it is performed with both egregious logic blunders and frightfully mangled syntax.

 

==============================

 

BTW: A question for current educators (and spouses, etc., thereof): Are students required to write book reports any more?  If not, when did that practice die out?

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

 

[Cancer]

Considering their history, these count as evil math problems in multiple senses of the expression.

[Pariah]

I had to explain to one of my classes the other day that Buddy Holly was an actual person and not just a Weezer song.

[Bazza]

He was an American Pie! 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]