Chaz is pro-calculator
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I had one test in college that I knew I'd need to abuse this rule for, along with several other students in my class. The test was going to online, 100 T/F or multiple choice questions, pulled randomly from a pool of 400 questions. Someone in the class had run through all of the practice quizzes until he had transcribed all the 400 questions into an Excel spreadsheet, listed the correct answer next to it, and sorted all the questions alphabetically.
He then sent that spreadsheet to everyone in the class.
The idea was that on your cheat sheet, 8.5x11", front and back, you could write EVERY SINGLE QUESTION (or at least enough of the question that you could distinguish it from every other question nearby it in alphabetical order) and then write the right answer beside it (A, B, C, D, True, False).
Granted the initial student had to spend about 6 hour preparing all that, and every other student had to spend a few hours individually copying the 400-row spreadsheet in tiny text onto the cheat sheet, but once you'd done that, you'd have an alphabetical index of every possible question and answer.
I can't say it was easier than studying properly, but it's a fun story.
Necronic
Staff member
That teacher (freshman chem) held us to the standard of having to know both, and I'm glad he did. When you take a class like Thermodynamics it is insanely helpful to understand how logs and exponential curves will look without having to go pull out your graphing calculator. Anyone who has to graph something to get a rough picture of what an increase in entropy/enthalpy/specific heat/ etc. will do to some system shouldn't be in the sciences.
With calculus (or most pure math) it doesn't matter as much because you are working with truly abstract mathematics. It doesn't matter that you can look at the integral of tangent and say, ohhh as x goes to blah then blah goes to blah. Because its abstract, there's no application to a real world system. You would still need that innate comfort with numbers/math for factoring equations and juggling terms to rearrange something into a form you can integrate.
That said, why would someone even need a calculator in a calculus class? I can think of a couple min/max problems that might require one, but really the teacher should be writing questions that don't need them. Seriously though, someone help me. When would you need it? And don't say "to calculate the natural log of 5", because for this kind of math, "ln 5" is a much better answer than "1.609..."
On top of that, most graphing calculators will do derivatives for you these days, which kind of defeats the purpose of a calculus course.
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With regards to the notes, I have to say that the single best (and most difficult) class I ever took had tests that were open book, open note, bring whatever you wanted, and 4 questions long. It was my Physical Chem/Thermo class and my Quantum Mechanics class. Thing is, if you didn't know what you were doing before you walked in to take the test, you would fail. The professor was brilliant, every question had this incredible way of testing if you really understood the science. That doesn't mean you know the equations, that means that you know what the equations mean. He tested true knowledge, and that's something that no amount of notes will teach you in an hour if you don't already know it. I've never taken another class like that since (funny story with that class: I had to ask the professor what the chemical symbol for gold was so I could answer some test question that required molecular weight or some such thing, I knew it was either Au or Ag, I always get it mixed up. He kind of stared at me like I was an idiot for a second and I shrugged my shoulders saying 'hey I get them mixed up'. So he procedded to interrupt the rest of the class that was taking the test and asked them if anyone could help me out. We all laughed. Good times, good times.)
fade
Staff member
In my graduate classes, like your professor, I don't ask questions to ascertain your store of knowledge. I ask questions that force you to synthesize the store of knowledge and prove that you actually understand it. I do warn the class ahead of time that that will be the case, so it's not a blindside. I often word my test questions in the form of a scenario, or I ask why a certain thing is true (rather than having the student regurgitate the factoid).
Necronic
Staff member
I'm trying to remember a couple of his questions, because they were so damned good.
For the Quantum Mechanics class one question asked what an electron was (multiple choice.) The correct answer was "we don't really know." Another had to do with the wave-like motion of objects, and whether it would apply to a baseball. Technically it would, but due to the scale it is effectively a classical system.
For the thermo class he had some question that would have taken an hour or more to calculate, but if you understood the system, it was immediately apparent that the change in internal energy was zero (can't remember why.)
For the Quantum Mechanics class one question asked what an electron was (multiple choice.) The correct answer was "we don't really know." Another had to do with the wave-like motion of objects, and whether it would apply to a baseball. Technically it would, but due to the scale it is effectively a classical system.
For the thermo class he had some question that would have taken an hour or more to calculate, but if you understood the system, it was immediately apparent that the change in internal energy was zero (can't remember why.)
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