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

One more incidence of apparent cheating I’ll post next time. Class dismissed.

We are still on my mechanics lecture exam. Previously, as in during the early part of the term, I was talking about two students who were talking to each other in lowered tones during the exam while in one corner, not knowing that the acoustics of the room still made them audible, even if I was across the room and talking to another student.

So far I have not called their attention to it because they have not had attention grabbing peaked scores, relative to their otherwise consistent performance.

During the last exam, in fact, their tactic of always arriving late left them with two seats not in the corner but right in the middle of the room. They had very little opportunity to talk, and only did so when the whole class was in an uproar after one of the students asked me to clarify the man on the platform and I drew the illustration on the board.

Of course there reactions that they thought the pulley was on the ceiling and such, despite the clear wording of the problem (chuck it up to their rushed and faulty comprehension).

They chatted along with their classmates at that point, but I knew better than to assume they made the same wrong judgment as the others.

One of them, in fact (the one who was not also enrolled in the same course last term – and obviously failed), had several numbers where he wrote the same numeric value. Just the value, not the solution.

Ordinarily I’d give one point to that, and when the student complained, I’d tell them that the instructions said to give their complete solution, which gets the full points.

This time though, I could not see a rationale why he would think that several succeeding questions would have the same numeric answer.

He cannot very well be thinking, “I know this the correct computation for one of the problems, I just don’t know which,” because if he knew how to solve it, he would know which number it is the answer to.

So my only conclusion is that he copped that answer off someone else’s paper, but he’s not sure which number it’s for, so he’s hedging his bets. So it doesn’t deserve a point in my book.

In my sole Electromagnetic Theory meeting for the twelfth week of classes (the students wanted no more lecture, but I told them we still had some to make up besides that) I discussed integrals in getting the electric field and potential for capacitors, with and without dielectrics. Of course we had to review some of the direct substitution formulas we took up in Electricity and Magnetism two terms ago, but I did not dwell on that.

There are two more topics before we close up shop in the subject: current density and magnetic field (which uses not integrals but the cross product).

That’s it for today. I’ll resume my twelfth week lectures tomorrow. Class dismissed.