phy 201
Your 'question form' report has been received. Scroll down through the document to see any comments I might have inserted, and my final comment at the end.
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I have a question about all of the work that we are required to submit. I have been doing every assignment and it is taking me forever to get through the curriculum. I just wanted to know what kind of grade I would receive if I only completed the labs and the tests or the assignments and the tests minus the labs. And if I will not receive a good grade by doing this then if I have everything except for the labs done by the end of the semester will I be able to have an extension? Thank you so much for your time.
If you were attending this class you would spend about 90 hours in class and labs, and at least an equal time outside class doing homework and other preparation. This comes to about 180 hours, which is a reasonable amount of time to expect to spend on this course.
Some students can get by with less time, but some find that it is possible to spend significantly more time completing these assignments. Not everyone has more than 180 hours to spend on this course.
A student who has managed to get into the course without the necessary prerequisites will often spend a tremendous amount of time on the first few assignments, before bringing their thinking and their skills up to the level of the course. Many students in this situation are simply unable to bring their work up to the level of the course, and will proably need to complete the necessary prerequisites before they have a reasonable chance of success.
Even a student who has completed the prerequisites might have some difficulty, especially if grades in the prerequisite courses were low. Sometimes prerequisite courses are also either taught at an inappropriately low level or are graded too leniently, allowing students to slide by without mastering the content. However nearly all students who have completed the prerequisite courses at most schools and/or colleges will be able to succeed in their physics course, though perhaps some additional effort will be required at the beginning.
Your work, especially your recent work, has been of very good quality. You are working at the level of the course, and should have no trouble from this point on with the level of the work or prerequisite knowledge.
If you were to complete only the labs and the tests your average on these tasks would be your course grade. I wouldn't penalize you for not submitting the other work. Submitting the other work can of course help your grade, especially if you're near a borderline.
However if you don't submit the work you aren't likely to learn enough to properly prepare for some of the labs, or to well on the tests.
You can probably learn enough to get by just doing the initial qa, reading the text and doing the text problems with reasonable success.
You do need a passing average on the labs in order to pass the course. However a passing average on labs is not that difficult to achieve. If your test grades are good, a relatively low lab grade won't seriously hurt your chances of passing the course.
Here are my recommendations:
I recommend that you run through and submit the 'open qa' exercises. These take a little time but for most students they provide the most efficient learning opportunity.
The cq problem and the 'open qa' are intended as the first two things you do for any assignment. Having done these two, the rest of the assignment should make much more sense. If you do only these two things, you will almost certainly learn enough to at least pass the course.
The third thing I would recommend is that you work through the Introductory Problem Sets as assigned. Like the q_a_ and the cq problems, the Introductory Problem Set is a sequenced series of problems with solutions provided. Also the Introductory Problem Set problems appear frequently on tests (in fact after the Major Quiz the tests are entirely composed of problems from the Introductory Problem Sets).
I would then recommend that you take some time to view the Class Notes, read the text and work the assigned problems. You can probably get by without doing so, but at least a little time spent on these sources, after doing the introductory work, will be quite beneficial.
You can 'cut some corners' on the labs and still pass them. I can let you know of you're cutting too much, and if you ask at the end of the lab what you could have done to cut down the time I can answer that question; you'll soon get the idea.
Let me know if you find these suggestions helpful.