Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Yesterday I had the second fifty-point quiz in my electricity and magnetism lecture class.

There were six questions from the topics of electric potential of an electric dipole (there’s some redundancy in there somewhere) up to the electric potential energy of a capacitor.

Technically, they could earn up to fifty-five points if they answer all the questions correctly.

There were questions that were only five-points each because they only required direct substitution from the list of relevant equations, which were also provided. Of course the wording of these questions made them look a little more complicated than they actually were, but that was my concession in my long standing devotion to the gods against spoon-feeding.

But if the students went out of their way to write down the given and what was being asked for by the problem, they would have seen that they have the answer in on equation with one unknown.

There were three ten-point questions. One asked for the length of a cylindrical capacitor given a spherical capacitor with a similar capacitance and radii. This was in reality a slight modification to a problem that I gave them in their reviewer last Monday, to which no one has come forward asking if their solutions to those problems are correct. Besides this there was one other problem from that reviewer that I changed a little and included in the test, a reward for those who took the time to study the problems I gave them.

Not that I heard anyone during the test express delight in seeing a problem they knew how to answer from previous experience.

The other two ten-point problems required some analytical computing for the charge and potential of a conducting disk with two different surface charge densities for the inner radius and outer radius. This is again similar to another problem we solved in class with a flat conducting ring, and just needs a little analytical leap of faith on their part.

As if there was ever a time when students ever expressed certainty in their answers (either during recitations or exams), regardless of whether the teacher has a history of giving ‘Trick Questions or not.

Anyway, given what happened yesterday, I thought I acted pretty fair with the quiz I gave them. I did not take it out on them through the quiz by giving questions I knew they could not answer. If ever, I think I’ve been making the questions steadily easier and easier since the first quiz, at least by my previous record.

Not that their reactions yesterday were any indication. They still consumed the whole period to finish, although at about ten to fifteen minutes before the end of the session there were already some people who closed their test booklets (giving up? I won’t know until I check the papers) and just sat their seats planning to wait out the rest of the time.

I still gave them the questions as a problem set to be submitted next Thursday.