zlacker

>>lxm+(OP)
> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work

I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later.

> eliminate zeroes in grade books

Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.

> and re-do tests

Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.

>>Walter+YJ
I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse

>>ahevia+tK
It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.

>>Walter+dL
At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems).

I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.

>>mlyle+rO
> like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car

Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn.

> I wouldn't assess based on them

I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?

>>Walter+SQ
A slight variation of that balloon question (it asked what happens to the balloon when the car starts moving) was on a Ph 1 homework at Caltech in 1977. I don't know if I'd call it a trick question, but there were large contingents supporting both "it moves toward the back" and "it moves toward the front", and a few going with "it stays where it is".

Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students, and that homework set happened to come out right before that. The Disneyland trips always had a large number of first year students, and Ph 1 is a required course for all first year students, so something like 80% of the people in my bus on that trip had opinions on that problem. Several bought balloons when it was time to return to the buses.

It must have been a strange sight to the bus driver to see the entire busload of students get on the bus and then just sit in silence staring at balloons while waiting for the bus to start moving.