Obviously, I’ve been away from the blog. (Thanks Mosher for keeping things alive!)<\/p>\n
So what have I been doing? As many know, I’ve been enjoying tutoring. With the upcoming semester, I wanted to get some stuff ready for when students are really motivated to do things. In that regard, I have a “moodle” site. Last year, I acquired several AP Physics C students one month before the test, and helped them with problems. Two of those students had found some ‘not officially disclosed’ Multiple Choice sections of AP Physics C. (I had not known these exist.) To answer their questions, I am coding alternate versions of questions now. It seems to me that kids who work the multiple choice practice early on identify their specific weak points more easily than those who bang their heads on the free-response before they are really ready to cope with those, so I’d like to have a supply of useful MC questions for students to practice them. <\/p>\n
Of course copyright prevents me from distributing the actual versions. But I don’t see anything wrong with figuring out the proportion of kinematic questions that have equations vs. numbers for answers, nor noticing that the AP picks values for constants and time that would never<\/i> require a student to use a calculator. Now that I know the ‘flavor’ of the questions, I wanted to code up versions that test the same notions but in a slightly different way. Once coded these can be used year after year likely even after the AP decides to somehow change their test in some way.<\/p>\n
It always helps to do this quite a while before they are needed, to create them in one fell swoop and organize them in categories. I’ve been doing that. I’ve also been coding conceptual physics questions and organizing that dovetail a particular schools curriculum and doing a similar things for a UIC Phys 105 class. All of this is enjoyable, not at all difficult and so on. But it is a time sink. <\/p>\n
But now for conversation!<\/strong> I’d like to hear people’s opinions on a very old scandal related to university students at University of Central Florida. It happened in 2010. The scandal is discussed here: here<\/a>. <\/p>\n If I understand correctly:<\/p>\n I want to hear what others think, so I’m not going to share my opinion at length. (I can state that Jim and I were in violent agreement on our views. \ud83d\ude42 But I’m not at all sure our views are in the majority. ) I’m going to hold off saying more until I hear what others interested in sharing their views think. (For what it’s worth, I suspect people will have a view and must will be unlikely to change it with conversation. It’s clear from discussions back in the day that lots of people have very<\/i> strong views on this. I’m just curious to learn what people think about the incident.)<\/p>\n Naturally, there are videos. This one is a very upset professor accusing his students of cheating.\n
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