This one had many attachments. I can't put them all here. You can go to your email and get them yourself. I've only attached a second copy of the year-end topics lists here. Quoted below was the text of the original email, which was important, Item C at the bottom being the most important for anyone who says they want to do AP Exam review. If seeing this here now indicates to the student that the student now has too many words to read from me, that is the student's fault. These things were intended to be read as I emailed them, one at a time, promptly when I sent them. Those who let things pile up aren't engaging in communication, and that's on them. Reading everything I send isn't a lot to ask in a class that only meets 50 minutes a day, every other day.

 

 

"If me giving you a list of subtopics to summarize the school year right now is the first time you're seeing such a thing, you're doing it wrong. You've been given such lists all year. And you're supposed to re-make such lists yourself. That is, if you're someone who says they want to study for a comprehensive test. Throughout the year, I gave you study guides for each unit. Each of those study guides had organized lists of learning objectives. And 2nd semester's E&M workbook couldn't be any more organized with a list of learning objectives at the start of every unit. Anyone who wanted to do so could have done all 8 units of that E&M workbook by now. And it's a workbook written by someone who WROTE AP tests for the College Board, so his 16 or so problems per unit are some of the best practice that a person could find. I've known students earn 5's on the E&M exam just by using the workbook that I gave them and not being in my class.

 

The fact that you've had organized information all along informing you of the subtopics is why I say you tell me the topics you want if you say you want year-end comprehensive review. If you say you want to review for an AP Test, you cull the outline and objectives lists together. You make the topic outline. It's been laid out for you all year. And I don't recall anyone recently saying something like, "Hey Mr. Warren, I once had the Conservation of Energy Study Guide you gave to students with its organized Objective lists, but since November, I lost it, so could you send me another one." No one has asked that.

 

 

The attachments are:

 

1) Yet another list of Subtopics broken down - am I contradicting myself by sending this after what I wrote above? I wouldn't be attaching another subtopic list if it were just the same things as I've already been giving throughout the year. Any individual who cares can read for themselves what's new about the new one and why it's being provided now.

 

2) As many old multiple choice test as I could find. Both E&M and Mechanics types - Multiple Choice tests force definition review as you consider the fact that each is intended to be solved in under 80 seconds. If you're slow, you don't know the definition, and it forces you to go become strong with it. So don't say these tests lack value just because there is no MC on this year's AP exam.

 

3) Keys to the tests

 

 

And finally, given that anyone who has wanted to has been in contact with me individually and is getting individual attention, I don't fully understand what Zoom is for and what it adds. But don't worry about it; I'm not ending

Zoom meetings, and if I strategize about changes in the way that tool is to be used, that's a different topic that has little to do with AP Review.

 

Please read one more thing below about AP Review, but before you do, hear one more time the following underlying assumptions: No claim is being made about whether the AP test is something that you should value in your life. You are the only one who can decide that. No pressure is being applied to think that this is more important than healthy living during a quarantine. Furthermore, if you think your job is to please me, you're playing the wrong game. I'm offering a service to those who say they want it, and no judgment is being made about those who don't want it. To those who say they want it, consistency is required between what they say they want and the actions needed to get there. The last two paragraphs below state what consistent actions are. Do these academic things because they add intrinsic value to your life, not to please someone else. The only professional opinion I can offer is that from my experienced observation, the College Board offers a high quality product in their AP Physics C tests. Of all the AP Physics test varieties, C tests are the highest quality of their products. I have no way of knowing the quality of the quarantine version of test product that is coming your way. But there is enough past experience to be hopeful about it, and that's just opinion. So given all of that, the following is not opinion:

 

 

A. AP Review is very simple: if you want to do it right, you have to do problems, you have to do problems beyond whatever meager number of them that I can come up with, and you have to self-motivate to choose problems on your own to do. And then to communicate your questions about those problems.

 

B. 50 minutes every other day between 9 and 10 is nowhere close to the time needed to go over the problems that you end up doing. And each of you is the one who has to demand more time and communicate that to me, and then I could give you a link to even more facetime on the computer screen going over problems. It's that simple if you say you want to gear up for AP testing.

 

C. I do my absolute best review work when I think of follow-up problems and applications that are organically generated from my active thinking that happens during the review session live. This happens ONLY as a direct result of THE SPECIFIC PROBLEM-SOLVING QUESTIONS THAT STUDENTS ASK FROM PROBLEMS THAT THEY HAD ALREADY WORKED ON before the meeting started. That's a huge review session benefit that only arises if students work on the practice problems before the meeting starts. This is true independent of Zoom. This was the case with Room 206 review sessions that happened last fall. Some, but not all, students experienced this.

 

 

As far as item C goes, when people show up to a review session intending to work on problems for the first time while in the session and not ahead of time, then those people are out of the game and don't come close to benefit that item C just described. It's incompatible with the dynamic exchange that's supposed to happen during review sessions, and this is the precise motivation for the speech I made about this in the meeting on Thursday, April 23. There should have been many questions about the 2012 problem, because it was in student possession for over two days by then, and those questions would have lead to extensions and enrichment, and did you not notice that even with low participation, I still made up about 3 extensions to the 2012 problem beyond what was required in the College Board test?"

                                                                                                                                                            "

 

The vast majority of requirements of students has been communicated from me in written form in documents. That will continue to be the case. Students are held accountable for everything I put in writing. Students are also held accountable for verbal instructions of tasks I give in meetings. The latter have obviously been far less frequent. Sometimes (and perhaps each time) the latter have been also supported with precise wording in a document to back them up.

 

The person who understands all of the above will naturally use Zoom as the tool that it is - an additional place to bring forward questions, driven by student, with which I will help."

 

After those 11 sentences, it said:

 

"Above are the 11 sentences that were required. The remaining sentence is optional and recommended.

 

There are people who don't understand the ramifications of what's written above, because they're not promptly reading what I write, but you, the individual who promptly reads everything I write, doesn't need to worry about that, because I'm serving each student individually, and each person can take care of themselves."

Attached to this post is the document version of Wednesday March 25's lesson on RC Circuits.

 

It repeats exactly what we did. It corrects one egregious algebra mistake I made at the end, and most importantly, it has a couple of new pages where you complete the math of solving for Q(t). Please complete this math on the undone pages of the attached document. I think it's fair to say to do this by Friday, because I already said to make it a goal to complete Unit V by Friday. The solution for Q(t) in is a part of Unit V. So I already said to do it days ago. This attached document just gives you another resource to do the same thing, and it links it to our Zooming.

 

So please either:

 

1) Work through the remainder of this attachment, the pages that we didn't finish in March 25 Zoom.

or

2) Do all of the associated Pages of the Unit V workbook carefully. The topic being RC circuits and the time dependence. These pages are at the end of the unit.

 

Or do both. And read the textbook too! In other words, try to master RC Circuits.

 

Last thing: people who have seen RC circuit behaviors in one of my other classes. My hope is that we have deepened the knowledge to where you can now derive some of the math forms yourself.

 

See you in March 27 class.

March 13 Message to Students in All of Mr. Warren's Physics Classes:

 

This message will talk about schoolwork in the next two weeks, but first:

 

Number One Priority until class meetings resume: Your safety and health and your family's safety and health and our responsibility to help avoid the spread of viruses to other people. First and foremost, take all necessary measures to safeguard those things without regard to completing schoolwork.

 

Second, assuming that the above is the case, you will be able to access the work of the physics course you are in via this Assignment Announcement Spot that I've been using for the whole school year. I will be uploading documents with what I hope is a user-friendly, simple, and manageable set of material for the two weeks between March 13 and March 27. The general topics will be:

 

Physics:

I'll post a test you can take by yourself on Chapter 7 and then a rubric so you can grade your own performance.

I'll post material related to the new topic of Charge and the Electric Force. You will want your textbook at home.

 

AP Physics 1:

 

Hello Period 4,

 

It's currently 11:30 AM on Monday, March 16. First, we need to fill in the Missing Lesson. This is what I would have told you on Friday March 13. It's now in Paper Form: Fundamentals to Circuit Tricks Part 2. For what's about to be stated below as assignments, it presumes you know the main idea of Fundamentals to Circuit Tricks Part 2 (attached).

 

I will shortly be posting the second* assignment in electric circuits. It will presume that by now you've done your best to complete Unit IV of the workbook. Using the Unit IV practice problems as your guide, please send me specific questions about problems now that you might have missed from the end of the Unit IV. There are 17 great problems at the end of Unit IV.

 

In addition to the Unit IV Problems as your way of self-diagnosing, the attached document that I wrote called "C-EQ Breakdown" could help a lot to check efficiency on the topic of multiple capacitors in circuits.

 

So use all of the above to check yourself on Unit IV before I post Circuit Assignment #2, which is coming soon.

 

*The first assignment was sending me a photo of yourself near the PhET simulation working. Optional assignment. No electronic submission assignments are required.

Exp 3 Help Is Posted Here Now In The Attachment. It's very thorough.

 

It's an Experiment 3 Conclusion accuracy checker, exactly as I listed in class on Friday, Feb. 28 but better.

 

I said I'd post it Sunday (but I went home with a cold after robotics instead and just slept - sorry.)

 

Keep reading related to write-ups in general.

 

I said before that I wouldn't take in any new write-ups until you got your Exp. 1 write-up back. That has now happened. On a few, I wrote "Uncorrectable." This is due to lack of data. There were two versions of this, one more severe than the other:

 

1) Less Severe: If you didn't report your measured period at the beginning in the data section. This is important, but later physical values in the report did not depend on it. So I corrected the report anyway but dinged the data section, pointwise. I think data are most important.

 

2) Very Severe: If you didn't report your amplitude angle at the beginning in the data section. This is vital, because almost all the later physical values depend on it. Therefore uncorrectable.

 

Moral: Don't leave any vital data out of the Data Section of Experiment 3, and make sure all such data occur before anything else. It's a part of respecting your audience. Your audience will be correcting your accuracy using a spreadsheet that takes vital data into its input cells so that final answers are determined in the programmed output cells. Those output answers in this case are slope and intercept. If I can't enter all necessary data into the input cells just by reading the data section, the report lacks quality. Don't assume I know all data just because it was a class data set. Write all known values upon which later results mathematically depend. (And if you write some things as data that don't lead to any calculated results, that won't do any harm (as long as you are neat and clear.))

 

Related to that, I absolutely loved many Experiment 1 correction activities. Many people made it easy for me to enter raw data, and it was fun to correct, especially because most of those people even converted their angle to radians. Very considerate and I appreciate it!

 

If a person got "Uncorrectable" on their Experiment 1, they may submit again, but the downside is that they lose feedback before completing future write-ups. I expect to be back on campus on March 3.

Reminder: Experiment 3 Write-up is due on Tuesday Feb. 3

 

This isn't news. It was announced awhile ago in the posting titled "Experiment 3 Assignment Sheet". And I announced it to the class on the day when I made that posting. That posting is still there if one looks in Past Assignments.

 

So I'll be collecting those write-ups at 8 AM.

Heads-up:

 

Support documents attached here now. Most are related to Task 1 below, which requires focus.

 

Assigned task at 8 AM Friday 2/7 was to get good at two things by Tuesday 2/11 (under the assumption that a chunk of the 2/7 class was provided to work on this skill, mostly skill #1 below):

 

1) Principle of Superposition for total E field calculation. In other words, solving for the total E field at any point in space as the vector sum of individual E field terms that exist at that point in space.

 

2) Applying the conservation of ME principle when U changes involved are caused by the electric force due to point charges. The last three questions, E, F, and G of the Electrical Oscillation Mission Sheet reinforce this skill well. That should be sufficient actually.

 

But Task 1 above almost always takes much more practice. So the rest of this message is about the attached documents meant to support that:

 

E field Superposition Example 2017 and 2018 were both handed out in class, but you only got Pages 1 and 2 of each. The real documents are longer. You will want to see how you did on each. Use the longer documents to see if you did things the good way. The Good Way means getting the right E field answer in an efficient way. The Good Way means Using Proportional Reasoning. Proportional Reasoning isn't optional. People who repeatedly reach for the calculator plugging and replugging into Coulomb's Law are doing it wrong. These notes covered why. I've shown at least one example in person to explain why.

 

The Unit I workbook was to have been used by now. It and the 2018 and 2017 documents were provided last week. With that, one could conceivably have the Topic #1 covered and practiced. Those were all the things last week that needed to have been done to be caught up with the objective I stated (listed as #1 above) on Friday 2/7 at 8 AM.

 

And for those of you who want more self-testing to check skill and efficiency on Topic 1, I now give three self-tests, the time you spend on them being totally up to you. Their names in the attachments are: "Superposition Quiz Self-Evaluator", "Self-Quizzing - Vector Addition of E fields", and "Move Vector Addition Practice". Mock quizzes, basically.

Final Exam Free Response #2 Rubric

 

The attached document illustrates that 13.93 out of 15 points of the Free Response Question 2 on the 2020 final were predictable Gift Points.

 

Please note: I haven't graded any student responses yet. I don't know what scores any individuals got. I'm pointing out what points any person could get with little test-time effort. The "any person" here means someone who did their reading and learned the terminology.

 

There's no statement here telling a person what they're supposed to earn. The rubric simply says things like "these two particular points were gift points" mainly because I either told people it was coming or some other such thing that only requires eyes be open. I'm not going to say, "You have to take the gifts." However, I do say, "This is how points are awarded in this course. The choice is yours." People who don't know they've had this choice have had their eyes closed to certain things.

 

I'll make another such rubric and Gift Point claim for Free Response 3 and post it as soon as I can. The Gift Point count on Free Response 3 will not be as high as 13.93 out of 15. One who reads the rubrics could easily see why.

 

FR2 has all but one raw point as freebie, because I told people exactly what they'd be tested on for #2, and I told them months ago, and then I told them again more recently with examples from old tests. People who don't take the gift points but claim they want to are people who make communication errors, not physics errors. I can point out such errors. I can't tell people what to do, so this isn't criticism. It's mere facts. And remember, I state this still without grading student responses from this year yet. So in these statements, I'm being as objective as I possibly can.

 

Semester 2 will continue to have gift points that are vocabulary and reading dependent, and more so, because the terminology will relate to electrical quantities which can't be seen with the naked eye, unlike this past semester.

 

It's also worth noting that life's too short and difficult to make academic tests be anything but simple. Why would the test writer ever intend to make them complicated? In any instants where after the test a test-taker reports a test item as complex or time-consuming, they are in all cases erroneously characterizing the items as complex or time-consuming in places where they're not. Any person can be aware of the point-scoring game that is inherent to any test, and that's why I point out the gift points.

 

Electric field and Electric Potential will be a topic in Semester 2 whose test grades will either be close to 100% per individual or very low per individual with little middle ground, and I never apply any AP scaling to it, because it's not timed. (The scores go into the gradebook as raw score and 85% is an A, 70% is a B, and so on.) This isn't a threat to create motivation. It's a topic whose skills come directly out of reading and practice, and students either do it or don't. It will be inappropriate to claim that the 100%-earners did so because they're smart. That particular test will be entirely full of predictable skills to apply. I tell the class in advance.