Week 0 Problem Set
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The exercises below are due at 10:00pm on Monday, 10 February, with the exception of the pre-lab exercise, which is due before your lab section on Friday (7 Feb).
Prelab
Most (but not all) problem sets will include a prelab question (to be completed before your lab section), which serves to help to prepare you for the lab.
Drills
Drills are targeted practice on mundane skills that we eventually want to become second-nature but which are not conceptually deep. Drills are probably not the most fun exercises we'll ask you to do each week, but they are important, since developing these skills will free up your working memory to focus on less-mundane things when working on bigger, more-authentic problems.
Auto-graded Exercises
Auto-graded exercises are intended to serve as a bridge between the worked examples from lecture/recitation and the more open-ended problems later in the problem set. They are automatically graded, and you can attempt each as many times as you like, and you will receive feedback immediately after submitting. BUT it is in your interest to try to submit each problem as few times as you can; it's a bad idea just to spam the submit button, and we recommend only submitting when you're confident that your answer is correct. What's more, in a typical week, many of the auto-graded questions come from previous semesters' exams, and in an exam environment, you only get one submission.
Once the deadline has passed, a new button called "View Answer" will show up on these questions; you can click that button to see a solution, but doing so will prevent you from making any additional submissions to that question.
- Unknowns
- Simply the Best
- Nodal Analysis
- More Nodal Analysis
- Who's the Real Hero?
- HARDWARE QUESTION: Teensy Installation and Multimeter Use
- LOOKING AHEAD: Resistor Combinations Tutorial
Free-response Exercises
Free-response exercises are traditional problem set questions. They are generally more open-ended than auto-graded questions.
Just like with auto-graded exercises, once the deadline has passed, a new button called "View Answer" will show up on these questions; you can click that button to see a solution.
Show/Hide Detailed Information About FRQ Grading
Free-response problems are graded based on your ability to understand and to communicate that understanding of the material. Thus you must show your thought process. To receive full credit, solutions must be complete, legible, and well-organized. Trivial algebraic mistakes that might lead to an incorrect answer might not count against your grade for these problems. However, missing or incorrect explanations, even in the presence of a correct final answer, will be marked down.
The following general rubric will be used for grading each problem part:
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F: No substantial work. Simply writing a few equations or copying facts from the problem will not be awarded points.
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D: Some work, some evidence of knowledge about the material addressed, problem part started, but no significant understanding of the problem or progress shown. For example, pursuing a technically-feasible but non-preferred non-ideal approach to a solution, and then making major mistakes, will be graded in this way. Similarly, if the solution might be correct, but it is impossible to tell due to poorly presented thinking, the work will also be graded in this way.
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C: Meaningful progress toward a correct solution. Examples of this are:
- pursuing a feasible but non-preferred or non-ideal approach with and making meaningful mistakes; pursuing a correct approach but making one or more major mistakes (including mistakes that may have cancelled each other out);
- pursuing a correct approach to reach the correct solution but explaining that solution in a confusing manner, i.e. not showing a clear understanding of the reasoning behind the solution; or
- submitting a solution that might be correct, but is difficult to grade.
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B: Largely correct solution that could benefit from improvement due to important flaws. Examples of this are:
- pursuing a feasible but non-preferred or non-ideal approach correctly, or with only minor mistakes;
- pursuing a correct approach but making one or more major mistakes;
- pursuing a correct approach to reach the correct solution, but making major mistakes that have cancelled one another; or
- pursuing a correct approach to reach the correct solution but explaining that solution in a confusing manner, not showing a clear understanding of the reasoning behind the solution, or submitting a solution that is difficult to grade.
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A: Exceptional, clear, exemplary solution. Such a solution will:
- be developed through a preferred approach, with all work clearly labeled and explained well;
- contain at worst trivial algebraic mistakes, and no sign errors whose origins are conceptual;
- be easy to grade.
Note that an A-level solution doesn't need to be long. It need only be based on an appropriate direct approach that is clearly indicated.