Midterm evaluation: quick summary/comments
At today's lecture, about 40 students filled in the questionary to give feedback on the course so far: Information, organisation, time consumption, level of difficulty, home exam, and whether there should be numerics (programming) in this course. Thanks for your help! Here are a few points worth mentioning:
* In general people seem to be very happy with the course which is nice :)
* There is a good spread in peoples' opinion on the level of difficulty of the course and home exam, fram "too easy" to "very challenging". Given that this course nowadays has very many students from different semesters, study programs, background, we naturally cannot hit the perfect level for everybody. So I think this is the best feedback we can hope for. But perhaps should have included at least one much more challenging problem in the home exam?
* An overwhelming majority thinks that the course is best WITHOUT programming/numerics. This agrees well with the basic idea of FYS3140, to provide training in analytical methods.
* Some students would like podcasts, which would indeed be good. The main reason this is not done is that I think the dynamics of the lectures would suffer if I sat behind the screen writing. HOWEVER, the auditorium will soon be renovated and upgraded with new AV equipment. After this, video recordings should be possible!
* There was criticism that info about the final exam (what you are allowed to bring etc) is not on the web page. IT IS THERE! But you have to look on the course page (emnesiden -- which is independent of the semester), not on the semester page.
* Exam problems vs weekly problems: It is obvious, natural and necessary that exam problems will be different from the weekly problems. In the weekly problems you are drilled on some very specific, small part of the curriculum. In the exam you are expected to show that you can connect the pieces from different parts of the course and follow a longer line of argument. Which means that to prepare for the exam you should work on old exam problems (which are usually posted towards the end of the semester). That said, problem set 10 is an old home exam, and old exam problems have been used as examples in the lectures. But we can probably do better and provide/discuss more old exam problems earlier on in the course!
* Some students would like more physics examples. This would be nice but is hard due to the diverse background of the students. E.g. the course has traditionally been compulsory for meteorology students who come without any background in quantum physics. This is why I do relate things to physics applications in the lectures, but in a non-commital way.