Supervisions: Work to Do

Instructions

Work to Do: Michaelmas Term 2025

I normally update this table on Tuesday evenings.

Date of SupervisionWork for IA Nat. Sci. MathsWork for IB Physics AWork for IB Physics B
(Course A)(Course B)
13th-18th OctoberNo work set. (But bring with you any questions you have from the online preparation that you did.)No supervision this week.
20th-25th OctoberAll questions from sections A and B on the question sheet, except that you may omit A1 and A3 if you like.Questions A1, A3, A4, A5, A7, A8, B3, B4, B5, B6, B7, B8, B10, B11, and B13.Questions 1-9.Questions 1-6.
27th October - 1st November
3rd-8th November
10th-15th November
17th-22nd November
24th-29th November
1st-6th December

General notes

Where to find the questions

Computational questions in IB Physics A

These questions are just as important as the algebraic ones. You need to be able to set up computational models. Furthermore, these questions illustrate important physics. If you don't like MATLAB, use a different language, such as Python. Many of the questions can even be done with just a spreadsheet given a bit of determination.

I only need to see the output graphs and your comments. If possible, submit this all on paper with the rest of your work, by printing the graphs out. But if it's inconvenient for you to print them out, you can e-mail the graphs to me instead, naming the files with a name that includes your crsid.

I don't need to see your code if it works. If you can't get it to do anything useful, and it's in Python, you can send it to me by e-mail, along with any error messages you're getting, and I'll try to work out what's wrong with it. I'm not debugging languages other than Python; if you use them, you'll have to fix the problems yourself.

What I will mark

Re-arranging supervisions

I'm happy to re-arrange supervisions for almost any reason, providing that I have a week's notice. This means that you need to talk to me about it in the previous supervision (i.e. the supervision before the one that you want to rearrange), when all of the affected people are in the same place.

There's no need to read the rest of this section unless you are looking to re-arrange a supervision with less than a week's notice.

Sometimes students ask me to re-arrange their supervisions by e-mail, giving me less than a week's notice. The trouble with this is that it requires a number of e-mails to establish a possible alternative time that all three or four people affected can make, and sometimes for me to book a room. This series of e-mails usually takes a few days, by which point some possible rearranged times have already been and gone, and during which I have to allow not only for my regular timetable and the time of the rearranged supervision, but also for a number of hypothetical timetables based on rearrangements that might never happen. This is inconvenient, and if several students are asking for such rearrangements at once, can become impossible. And I don't think it fair to provide a flexibility to some students that I can't give to everyone. Furthermore, I consider that providing a reasonable amount of notice for rearranging supervisions is a basic level of professionalism with regard to their academic commitments that can reasonably be expected of students. Therefore I shall not re-arrange any supervision with less than a week's notice except for academic or health reasons.