Apathy Sketchpad

I have told you before, no doubt, about my University course, and in particular the lab module. I have told you about how much importance they impress on uncertainties. To coin a phrase*, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

See, I have a problem with wasting time. I, for one, am against it. The university marking schemes, it seems, were written by someone who favours inefficiency. Presumably, therefore, they hang upside down from the ceiling and mark the papers from several yards away using a very long pen and binoculars, which is why they’re always in a bad mood when they decide on my mark. They actually give marks for drawing diagrams that don’t help anybody. How, I ask you, do you draw a helpful diagram demonstrating the changes in angular momentum and moment of inertia when a spinning ice skater pulls in her arms†? If you do everything perfectly, but don’t elect to waste time drawing worthless pictures, you are penalised. It’s insane. I have, in fact, cynically used this to gain two marks out of five in a question I didn’t have the slightest clue how to answer.

Another example is on the Visual Basic course: Adam tried to use one line of code intead of three by doing the validation checks properly. The demonstrator didn’t understand this, and thought it very odd that anyone would want to do things any other way that the way suggested in the lab manual. For this reason, the component of Visual basic that does the validation is not installed on these computers.

But that I can cope with (because I’m not doing VB). What I can’t cope with is the cretin who marked my last lab experiment. To me, a good choice would have been someone with a brain, whose marks made sense, and whose comments somehow pertained to what the student had written, but then I’m not University staff, I’m just a crazy rebel who thinks concepts like “efficiency” are a good idea. I chose to save myself some maths by ignoring a quantity that would not affect the result in the slightest bit, and wrote four lines to explain what I was doing. He wrote three red question marks. I wrote down a value for g, then I worked out the uncertainty in g and wrote that down too. He asked for the uncertainties in both of these figures. In case you have never worked in a physical laboratory, this type of request is generally known as “unreasonable”, or “moronic”. I used the same formula on the next page, and wrote a note saying “formulae on last page” to make sure he spotted this without my writing it out again, and then just wrote down g and the uncertainty. He asked for the uncertainty. By the next page, I na�vely credited him with the intelligence to spot the pattern, and used the formula again, but only wrote down values for g and the uncertainty. He asked what formula I had used to work out the uncertainty I had quoted him, and then he asked for the uncertainty. I wrote a clear but breif conclusion. He wrote four lines of unhelpful, illegible nonsense, accusing me of having no uncertainties. Then he gave me six marks out of ten, while Agnetha was awarded eight and a half.

I don’t mean to sound bitter; it’s just that Agnetha was my lab partner. We did precisely the same experiment, got precisely the same results, and yet she got almost half as many marks again compared to me. I intend to dispute this mark when they collect our lab books in. I’ll keep you posted.

Every so often, somebody tells us about some university regulation or other. The trouble is, it’s a little like when Kryten said “I’m sorry, sir, but Space Corps Directive 2795 quite clearly states…”. It’s always about how much work we should be doing. I’m almost positive that there’s one in there somewhere saying we should have Wednesday afternoons off, but no, we never hear that one… I intend to find a copy of these guidelines somewhere, but they don’t include them in any of the documentation I have been given, or anywhere on the website. I imagine, cynically, I suppose, that they just don’t want us to know the rules.

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*Strictly, “to coin a phrase” means the opposite of what most people mean when they say it; that is to say it means “to invent a whole new phrase” rather than use one someone else coined. Therefore, that sentence should have read “To coin a phrase, armchair, fridge-freezer, old speckled hen”, but that really wouldn’t have had the same impact.†If you don’t do physics you might not know what I’m talking about. If you do, or ever have done, you’ll probably have answered the “skater’s arms” question before. Physicists as a whole don’t have much imagination.