Category: Academia

The ABC’s of AMO Physics

Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I’ll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind… Continue reading The ABC’s of AMO Physics

We Must Become Litigious Assholes or the Litigious Assholes Win

Via Thoreau, a story at Free Range Kids about “zero tolerance” policy run amok, this time from someone who moved to the US as a kid and ran up against the modern school culture in a bad way: Once again, I came from a culture where you were made fun of if you forgot your… Continue reading We Must Become Litigious Assholes or the Litigious Assholes Win

Good Advice Is Good Advice

Over at Inside Higher Ed, there’s a list of “survival tips” for women entering grad school in the sciences. It’s a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice– you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall. What’s striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific… Continue reading Good Advice Is Good Advice

Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series

There’s been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times’s investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using “Value Added Modeling,” which basically looks at how much a student’s scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and… Continue reading Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series

Grenade Tossing About Grade Inflation

Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that’s pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion: We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective… Continue reading Grenade Tossing About Grade Inflation

Academic Poll: That Time of Year

This one’s pretty self-explanatory: Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software You only get to pick one because that’s the way it is. If you need me, I’ll be over here scrambling frantically.

Academic Poll: On the First Day…

While I’m still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it’s beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss… Continue reading Academic Poll: On the First Day…

How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?

Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only… Continue reading How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?

The Science Mindset List

It’s nearly time for classes to resume, which means it’s time for a zillion stories about Beloit College’s annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year’s entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample: 1. Few in the class know how… Continue reading The Science Mindset List