Physics 105 Laboratory

Your grade in this lab constituents 25% of your grade in the Physics 105 course. It will be determined by weekly group lab reports, attendance/participation and a lab final. The relative weights are:

The midterm and final will be open notes, open book. You will be expected to analyze and plot data on these tests. If you leave it to your lab partner to perform these skills week after week, you may fail the exams. Also note that you must have your own copies of the lab for the test days; you cannot pass labs between partners during the test.

A report is written as a group and should represent a group effort. Your reports involve the analysis of the data you have taken in the lab. Reports should be written in Word with Excel plots pasted in them. A hard copy of the report should be handed in preferrably at the beginning of the next lab, but because of the summer pace can be handed in a week after the experiment is performed. There may be some reduction for each day of lateness after that.

Missed labs. One report grade will be dropped from your final lab grade. If you miss a lab, you should assume that it will serve as your dropped lab. (Labs are a group effort, but if you did not attend you are not considered part of the group that week. Time permitting you may be allowed to make up a missed lab.) Remember that you are responsible for the material from all of the labs and that it may appear on the tests. 

What goes into a report?

• A title - something more meaningful than "Lab 1"
  
  
• An abstract - a brief summary of what was done, that is, the essentials, not details, of the measurements and analysis. An abstract is not a statement of purpose; it is not the first few sentences of the introduction; it is not the step-by-step procedure for the lab. (While it appears first in the report, it is typically written last.)
  
  
• An brief introduction - a paragraph or two discussing the main topic of the lab; your textbook will come in handy here.
  
  
• The procedure - discuss the essential features of what was done; we don't want a step-by-step set of instructions.
  
  
• Data and analysis - present the data in the form of a table or a plot, perform any required calculations, fits, etc. You should not present large amounts of data in a table format, for example, a table that takes up more than one page is too long.
  
  
• Conclusion - do not include comments such as "this lab was really confusing" or "I really learned a lot"; it's not that we don't want you to communicate these things, but a scientific report is not the proper place. The conclusions should be about the experiment, e.g., it did or did not agree with theory; you can or cannot account for any discrepancies; and so on.
  
  
• The title and abstract must be separated, the other parts may be combined and rearranged so long as the report is reasonably logical. Our instructions typically ask you to do a calculation or plot some data, these should appear in your report. If we ask a question in our write-up, you should try to answer it in your report.
  
  

NOTE: Typically physical quantities have units (e.g. meters, seconds, etc.). Points will be taken off if you consistently forget to include them. In tabled data, the convention is to put the units in a column's header and not in each and every cell.