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.

For the second week in a row I've been letting my students use the lab journal format for our experiments in energy conversion lab.

The first time, I was intentionally vague because I said that their task was just to verify the theory we had discussed in class about the alternating current outputs of resistors and capacitors.

I only gave the objective, and told them they had to come up with the list of materials to be used and the circuits. Of course, what everyone immediately latched on to were the designated jobs, such as circuit designer, circuit constructor and equation calculator.

I also said that the report should be like a defense of how they proceeded with the experiment without resorting to either blame-passing or parading of their own contributions to the work.

In the end I commended three of the four groups for their first work: one for their detailed graphs (unfortunately only 40% of the overall grade); another for their conclusion that showed comparison of the theoretical and measured values, and given three different values of capacitance and resistance, who these affected the voltages and currents; and last for using the current meter to verify the current output of their circuit and not just relying on the oscilloscope.

The fourth group asked what I could commend about them (there was only one member present at the time, since this was done at the start of the period) and I just had to admit, their honesty in who did what job and who didn't do anything.

That was the same group, by the way, who asked if the neatness of the handwriting counted in the grade, when I also corrected the analysis of that same student for grammatical errors.

Also, I berated them for starting their analysis with "our experiment was a success" which is supposed to be in the conclusion part.

Session 2219, for a 4th year student, unfortunately still has a long way to go before being able to come up with a good technical report. Class dismissed.