Physics exam

[Yonah Ziemba]

 I just got 2  tips about the physics exam from someone on the faculty who spends  time working with Prof Hogg. 

1) Prof. Hogg said that he will take all questions from lecture problems and problem sets, and he is dead serious about that. There will not be a single question that we did not see before. Many students skip the homework problem sets because it's so hard to find out the correct answer, but after the exam they will regret it. It's an open notes exam and we have all the problems in our notes, so if you write clear notes that show how to answer these questions, the exam will be an easy 100%. But the students who never looked at the problem sets will have a very hard time. Don't bother with a textbook unless you need it to find the answer to a homework problem. The questions that we have are hard, but there are less than 20 of them.  (The source said that there may be a couple from lab, but the emphasis will be on the problems that Prof. Hogg wrote.)

2) Prof Hogg likes to write 'trap answers' to multiple choice questions where the number looks looks reasonable but the units are wrong. For example, he might ask to estimate the force of a moving rock, and the answer whose 'number part' looks best  will have units of [kg x m x s-1]. (It should really be [kg x m x s-2], remember that he likes to write a denominator as a negative exponent.)  So always first check which answers have the right units, and maybe prepare notes with a clear list of the all the proper units.