A few students will be making up Quiz 3 Friday morning, so I will not be posting the “clean” copy of the quiz until tomorrow. I do want to make some remarks about the quiz itself as well as notecards and quiz preparation.

First, I think the first question was harder than I intended it to be, which is my fault. I suspect that this may have affected most students’ ability to do well on the remaining questions. Even so, my overall reaction is that I did not provide you as a class with sufficient preparation to succeed on this particular quiz. I shall try to do better; I’ve thought quite a bit about where I may have gone wrong and have some concrete ideas in mind for improvement on my part.

Second, I think many of you are having trouble working out in general how to prepare, particularly with regard to your notecards. I’d like to call your attention to two specific things that may help:

1. Chapter summaries. You should be able to identify in the chapter summaries the material we covered. I will generally assume you have and know how to work with equations and formulas listed in these summaries.
2. Physics is cumulative. Even if the quiz is on Chapter 3, the material in that chapter builds on Chapter 2. So for instance, the kinematic equations listed in Chapter 2 for motion with constant acceleration come into play again in Chapter 4 (and 5, and 6…). So you might also want to flip back a chapter or two for further pieces of information to add to your notecards. (Hopefully over time much of that will become second nature, particularly math skills like working with trigonometry to find vector components.)

Thank you all for your hard work on this challenging material. It’s a privilege to work with you!