Instructor: Julia Velkovska      email: julia.velkovska@vanderbilt.edu

phone: 322-0656 ; office SC 6410

Office hours: Mon 2 pm - 3 pm in my office or by appointment

You are at liberty to work together on assignments or lab reports, but 
the material you turn in should be written on the basis of
your own understanding.

You will receive a numerical grade for the lab protion of the course and Prof. Hertel
will weight it as 25% of your 225a grade.  The lab grade will be
derived primarily from the average of the grades on the one assigned
homework and the lab reports.Each lab is worth 100 points (50 points 
on your Logbook and 50 points on the report).
 For exceptionally good or bad performance, grades can be readjusted.  

Lab reports are due one week after the completion of the lab. 
There is a 10 point penalty for every week a paper is late.  
I hope to ignore this policy for the rare instances in which
there is a good reason that a paper is late. 

A lab report should be a self-contained document written in full sentenses (not just a list of 
numbers and titles of sections). 
It should contain the following sections:

Lab objective
Description of Apparatus used
Experimental procedure
Data tables
Graphs (clearly labeled axes, error bars, untis)
Results and error analysis
Conclusion

Reports maybe submitted in electronic or paper form.
If you want to submit electronically, please use the electronic drop-box on OAK. 

Additional note: Your report should have all formulas that you use to calculate a quantity and all 
data that you have taken. All tables and graphs need titles and units on the presented quantities. 
When you calculate errors, you should explain how you got them. It is not enough just to give a number. 

Enter your data and a brief description of procedures used in your Electronic Logbook.
50 points from your grade will be on the Elog. Ask the instructor to check and 
acknowledge your Elog before you leave the lab.  You should have
thought through the steps for data reduction and made a first try at the
final calculation when you request checkout and you should expect to be quizzed
on whether you have all the measurements of the apparatus you will need for the
final calculation.

If your lab absences are rare and for good reasons, we will try
to find a time to let you make up the work with one of the instructors acting
as lab partner for parts that require two people.  Absences are a great
inconvenience to both your lab partner and to the instructors, so expect a
firm response if the absences are not well justified.
There are two lab make-up periods that are scheduled to accomodate exceptional cases: excused absenses 
or problems with the equipment that could not be resolved during the lab period.

You should have read through the lab write-up BEFORE coming to class. I acknowledge 
that sometimes it is hard to get much out of the writeups without
actually seeing the hardware, but you should have an idea of the goal for the lab and the steps 
that need to be taken to achieve that goal. To help your preparation, the lab manuals are currently 
being updated and some of them include color photos of the apparatus.