1304, Electricity and Magnetism for scientists and engineers. 2007 fall semester.

In this course we will discuss the principles and concepts of electricity and magnetism, and their applications in sciences and engineering.  The emphasis will be on physics concepts and problem solving skills and abilities. The students will only be required to memorize a few basic formulas. The ability to understand the problems at hand and decide which formula to use is the goal we will want to achieve.  

The lectures will be largely based on materials from "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" by Kinetic Books, ISBN:0-9766865-2-X. All lecture notes will be posted in this page and students are encouraged to download them and use them as your course material.

Office hours: Tuesday and Thursday from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM (one hour before lecture time) in my office (Fondren Science Building 037); or by appointment.

Help sessions are held by Ms Ana Firan (afiran@physics.smu.edu) from 1 PM to 2 PM, Tuesday and Thursday in room 026. Our grader is Mr. Alex Liang (zliang@physics.smu.edu). Please contact them for related questions.

We will follow the school calendar: http://www.smu.edu/registrar/pdf/Calendar%202007-08.pdf and final example schedule: http://smu.edu/registrar/Final_Exam_Schedule/finalexam_fall2007.asp in which our class is scheduled to SAT., Dec. 15, 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM.

There will be bi-weekly take-home quizzes plus close-book (four page, letter size and single side, formula sheets allowed), in-class mid-term and final exams. Homework is due one week after the assignment. Homework will be graded as 50% correctness, 50% completion. Once the homework key is posted, it is over due. Over due homework will not be graded but will get the 50% points for completion.  Discussions among students and with the instructors about homework and quiz problems are highly encouraged. Students are required to understand all problems in the homework and in the quizzes, which define the scope of the mid-term and the final exams. Students are required to solve problems in these two exams by themselves.

The final grade will be computed based on homework (30%), quizzes (30%), the mid-term exam (20%) and the final exam (20%).  The final exam will cover materials in the whole course and will be difficult. Whoever scores A in the final exam will get A in his/her grade report, regardless the averaged grade. There will also be bonus points associated with problems solved by students in class discussions, or mistakes (not typos, not numerical mistakes!) found in the lecture notes by students.

There is a class project, due by Dec. 15. This class project is counted as 4 bonus points to the averaged grade.

Letter grade break points:

91.5 < A  < 100
87.5 < A- < 91.5
83.5 < B+ < 87.5
79.0 < B  < 83.5
75.0 < B- < 79.0
71.0 < C+ < 75.0
62.5 < C  < 71.0
50.0 < D  < 62.5
  0.0 < F  < 50.0

Announcement: those who have the mid-term grade  below the prediction by more than 15 points, please see me to understand the reason.

Syllabus:

grade report and final grade prediction