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.

Talk about bad habits leading to more bad habits. The vicious cycle never ends.

There were some students of mine who were late for the general science requirement mechanics lab class, and they used as an excuse the fact that they had to finish their written individual report before showing up in class.

Now, I never said the report had to be submitted during the period, just within the day so as not to get any deductions. Besides, if it’s a toss up between missing one of the experiments or getting a minor deduction in one of the requirements, I’d choose the latter as being low priority any day.

It’s bad enough that they procrastinate and wait until the last minute to write their reports.

If they end up drawing that experiment that they missed in the practical exam, and they couldn’t answer any of the questions, whose fault is it then?

That reminds me: I will have to set the deadline as to up to when the students can schedule make up sessions for the experiments they were absent for, and that’s before the practical exam. I will write in on the board next time.

It also seems that students weren’t clear on the instruction that they should write down in their reports any changes made in the procedure, such as using a level instead of a bubble in the composition of concurrent forces experiment.

That one I will have to remind them again in the next session. It’s bad enough that the students just “copy” the first five parts of the report from the manual (objectives, set-up, theory, methodology and data). Now I also have students either just photocopying or taking pictures of their graphs and tables from the group notebook and pasting them in their report. It would have been well and good if it was a clear copy of either, but not the ones I’ve seen so far.

Next, there is a trend of using the computer (and the spreadsheet graphing software) for even the illustration of the vectors, when it’s easier to perform just by hand.

It’s sad that there are very few of the groups who try to improve on their mistakes and want to get a perfect score in the group report each time, while others couldn’t care less and repeat errors or have new ones each week.

Session 1531 really is out to do the least amount of work in class possible. Class dismissed.