Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

My second final exam for the week was Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lab.

For this one, no one was “exempted” because no one had really shown enough or consistent proficiency to get a high standing before finals. After all, there's the written reports, the practical exams and the group notebook.

I did warn them at the start that the exam will be all computations and filling in tables like in the manual, and not procedures and theories like in the mechanics lab, as some students of mine from last term were expecting.

Since series and parallel resistors were just one experiment in actuality and ohm's law was the most basic one applied to all circuits, there were only five questions instead of seven, one for each experiment.

EMF asked for the internal resistance given the terminal voltage and current.

There were two basic series-parallel circuits for which they had to give the voltage and currents through each resistor, a maximum of three per circuit.

Node and loop rule application was for a two-node three-branch simple circuit.

Galvanometer questions were the “most difficult” consisting of seven computations that had to be done in order, but were really obvious that asking for a quantity given the unit (such as amperes per division) could easily be derived by dividing the current by the number of divisions.

For magnetic fields, they only had to fill in the compass directions in the table reproduced from the experiment, with the directions changed to give a little mental challenge to those who just memorized the answers.

And for once I showed them the answers afterwards, for which some of them were surprised at getting the series and parallel ones correct.

Session 1275 asked basic questions during the test, and therefore was not answered. Class dismissed.