Lecturers at Maynooth University are supposed to be available on the telephone to deal with queries from students concerning their examinations. This morning I was “on call” for the first time in 2025 and indeed the first time since 2023. Since I live in Maynooth I decided to come into campus in case of a query so I could go to the examination hall to deal with it if required. In the event, however, the examination passed off without incident and nobody called.
I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all morning though. It seemed a good opportunity to go through the accumulated coursework for this module applying various exemptions for medical or other reasons so that when I’ve marked the scripts I can immediately combine the results with the CA component.
So here I am again, with a stack of an examination scripts to mark. The picture shows about 50 papers, part of the collection from my module on Differential Equations and Transform Methods. I want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February. I plan to spend the next couple of days correcting these, adding up the marks, combining those with the coursework, and preparing everything for upload to the system. I want to get this task out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February.
The January examination period starts tomorrow (10th January), so I thought I’d do a quick post on the topic of examinations. First of all let me wish the very best of luck everyone at Maynooth or elsewhere taking examinations in the next few weeks. I hope at least that the exam halls are nice and warm!
As the first examination for which I have responsibility is not until Monday 13th – unlucky for some! – I’ll have to wait to find out how any of my students have done but let me take this opportunity to pass on a few quick tips.
Try to get a good night’s sleep before the examination and arrive in plenty of time before the start. This is especially important when there’s bad weather that may disrupt travel. It is your responsibility to get to the examination on time!
Read the entire paper before starting to answer any questions. In particular, make sure you are aware of any supplementary information, formulae, etc, given in the rubric or at the end.
Start off by tackling the question you are most confident about answering, even if it’s not Question 1. This will help settle any nerves.
Don’t rush! Students often lose marks by making careless errors. Check all your numerical results on your calculator at least twice and – PLEASE – remember to put the units!
Don’t panic! You’re not expected to answer everything perfectly. A first-class mark is anything over 70%, so don’t worry if there are bits you can’t do. If you get stuck on a part of a question, don’t waste too much time on it (especially if it’s just a few marks). Just leave it and move on. You can always come back to it later.
Readers of this blog are welcome to add other tips through the comments box below!
As the Christmas holiday draws to a close and I begin thinking about the possibility that sooner or later, in due course, at some point in the future, in the fullness of time, all things considered, when all is said and done, in the end, I will have to start teaching again. Thinking about this is preferable to thinking about the stack of exam marking that I will have to contend with shortly.
One of the modules I am down to teach in the Spring Semester is particle physics, a subject I haven’t taught for well over a decade, so I have been looking through a box of old notes on the subject. Doing so I remembered that I had to explain neutrino oscillations, a process in which neutrinos (which have three distinct flavour states, associated with the electron, mu and tau leptons) can change flavour as they propagate. It’s quite a weird thing to spring on students who previously thought that lepton number was always conserved so I decided to start with an analogy based on more familiar physics.
A charged fermion such as an electron (or in fact anything that has a magnetic moment, which would include, e.g. the neutron) has spin and, according to standard quantum mechanics, the component of this in any direction can can be described in terms of two basis states, say “up” for the +z-direction and “down” for the opposite (-z) represented schematically like this:
In this example, as long as the particle is travelling through empty space, the probability of finding it with spin “up” is 50%, as is the probability of finding it in the spin “down” state, the probabilities defined by the square of the amplitudes. Once a measurement is made, however, the state collapses into a definite “up” or “down” wherein it remains until something else is done to it. In such a situation one of the coefficients goes to zero and the other is unity.
If, on the other hand, the particle is travelling through a region where there is a magnetic field the “spin-up” and “spin-down” states can acquire different energies owing to the interaction between the magnetic moment of the particle and the magnetic field. This is important because it means the bits of the wave function describing the up and down states evolve at different rates, and this has measurable consequences: measurements made at different positions yield different probabilities of finding the spin pointing in different directions. In effect, the spin vector of the particle performs a sort of oscillation, similar to the classical phenomenon called precession.
The mathematical description of neutrino oscillations is very similar to this, except it’s not the spin part of the wavefunction being affected by an external field that breaks the symmetry between “up” and “down”. Instead the flavour part of the wavefunction is “precessing” because the flavour states don’t coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian that describes the neutrinoes. For this to happen, however, different neutrino types must have intrinsically different energies (which, in turn, means that the neutrinos must have different masses), in quite a similar way similar to the spin-precession example.
Although this isn’t a perfect analogy I thought it was a good way of getting across the basic idea. Unfortunately, however, when I subsequently asked an examination question about neutrino oscillations I got a significant number of answers that said “neutrino oscillations happen when a neutrino travels through a magnetic field….”.
Sigh.
Neutrinos have no magnetic moment so don’t interact with magnetic fields, you see…
Anyhow, I’m sure there’s more than one reader out there who has had a similar experience with an analogy that wasn’t perhaps as instructive as hoped. Feel free to share through the comments box…
Today I completed the lectures for one of my modules, the one on Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering students, and gave the penultimate lecture for Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for final-year Mathematical Physics students. Both were revision lectures. As campus has been very quiet for the last few days I didn’t expect many (if any) students to show up for either of these classes, but some did, although numbers were a long way down on the start of the year.
Campus is always quiet this close to the holiday, but this time there has been a bug going around which has led to a few more absences than usual among students. Some staff have been affected too. I had a mild dose of whatever it was earlier in the week but got over it relatively quickly.
Tomorrow, the last day of Semester 1, I have my last lecture of this term, followed by a couple of final-year project presentations. Then that’s it until 2025. I am already thinking about what to do tomorrow evening to mark the end of term. I haven’t reached any definite conclusions yet, but it will almost certainly involve wine. Then I suppose I’ll have to start my Christmas shopping which will include buying more wine.
I am a bit flush this week because I’ve finally received rebates of overpayment from OVO Energy and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water relating to my former house in Cardiff. I sold this property months ago, after much tedious to-ing and fro-ing, but getting money back from utility companies is like getting blood out of a stone. OVO Energy were particularly bad, violating their statutory obligations. The offer3d me £60 additional payment in recognition of this but, although they eventually settled the bill, they never paid the compensation. It seems they just lied.
In contrast, and giving credit where it’s due, I am grateful to Cardiff City Council for paying back my overpaid Council Tax very promptly.
The forthcoming week is the second-to-last week of teaching term at Maynooth and, as usual at this stage of the Semester, we’re getting busier and busier.
The examinations for January have been sent off for printing and are (presumably) ready to go, so that’s one item crossed off the to-do list. I’m still behind on the coursework grading for one of my two modules, but should be able to catch up in the next few days. Other than that, I am miraculously on schedule as far as teaching is concerned. I should finish covering the respective syllabuses by Friday 13th, which means the following week will be devoted to revision. I expect attendance on campus will be fairly sparse in the last week of term, especially later on. I’ll be there until the bitter end, however, as I have a lecture scheduled on Friday 20th and have to attend final-year student presentations that afternoon. After that I will probably collapse in a state of exhaustion into the welcoming arms of the Christmas break.
While the week ahead will be fairly normal from the point of view of teaching itself, there are quite a few extra things in my calendar, as people try to get various things done before the break. Extra items for next week including a meeting about a staff recruitment (of which, hopefully, more anon) and another about the possible reorganization of teaching in the light of the merger of the Departments of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. Rationalization of teaching could lead to an improvement in the courses offered and also, by removing duplication, reduce our very heavy teaching workloads. Whether it will actually be possible to achieve either or both of these aims remains to be seen. In any case I’m not sure if any significant changes to teaching will be implemented before I retire, but I’ll probably go along to the meeting anyway in case there’s anything I can contribute.
I’ve also agreed to give a talk on Wednesday to the student Pride Society which I am looking forward to, although such events invariably make me feel very old!
As it happens, Friday 13th December is the date for the first Christmas dinner of the newly formed Department of Physics; previously, the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics held separate celebrations. It will be a much bigger group this time and, it being on a Friday evening we’ll have the weekend to recover before the last week of term.
Anyway, although it’s a Sunday I’ll be working all afternoon as I have a task to finish that is due tomorrow so I had better sign off. When I was younger I used to look forward to Christmas as a time for feasts and parties and socialising. Now that I’m older I look forward to it more than anything as a time for the sense of relaxation that comes from the lack of deadlines.
Maynooth University Library, home of the famous cat
As the count continues in the General Election in Ireland, the result of which seems likely to be the same old government, I am reminded that today is 1st December 2024, which means that it’s seven years to the day since I started work at Maynooth University. Despite the frustrations I’m still happy I made the move all that time ago.
One big change that has happened over the last year is that the Department of Theoretical Physics that I joined in 2017 no longer exists. It has now been subsumed into a new Department of Physics alongside the old Department of Experimental Physics. This is something that should have happened years ago, and should also have been handled in a better way. As it is, The Merger really just involved merging the two budgets with little thought given to how the new Department would function. As a result it still operates largely as two separate sub-Departments. Any benefits of the reorganization have therefore yet to accrue. The good side of this is that Senior Management seems to have lost interest in pushing us around, and it’s now up to the new Department to self-organize. I suppose in due course there will be changes, but in due course I will have retired.
When I wrote last year on the occasion of the sixth year of my appointment at Maynooth, I complained that the University had still not fulfilled the terms of my employment contract. With The Merger, members of the former Department of Theoretical Physics now have access to the technical support previously enjoyed by the Department of Experimental Physics so I suppose that particular ticket is closed. This blatant disregard for written contractual terms demonstrates, however, why I have so little trust in the University management. In that vein, it still concerns me that my contract says that I am employed by the Department of Theoretical Physics. Legally, does it matter that I am employed to work in an entity that doesn’t exist?
The thing I’m probably most proud of over the past seven years is, with the huge help of staff at Maynooth University Library, getting the Open Journal of Astrophysics off the ground and attracting some excellent papers. This year has seen yet more significant growth, with submissions and publications more than doubling this year, after an increase of a factor of three the year before. We’re still smaller than many of the mainstream astrophysics journals, but we’re still growing.
Anyway, I continue to enjoy the teaching, though doing two new modules in a term, plus an undergraduate project, plus supervising three PhD students, is quite a lot of work for an old man. That reminds me I have some correcting to do…
Today friend of mine send me a message pointing out that in order to save money the University of Sussex is planning to make about 300 staff redundant; you can see an article about it in the Times Higher here. For the time being it seems the plan to make these savings via a voluntary severance scheme. I don’t know whether academic and administrative staff will be treated equally, either.
This is grim news. I worked at Sussex from 2013 until 2016 when I resigned my post as Head of School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. I took that decision largely for personal reasons but there were professional reasons too. From 2013 the University had embarked on an ambitious growth plan based on buoyant student numbers and the fee income generated thereby. Staff numbers grew too, to cope with the increased demand for teaching. Unfortunately the management was unable to match this with real improvements in infrastructure, largely due to the disastrous outsourcing of campus estates and services. Many promises made to me as Head of School by Senior Management were broken. I wasn’t the only Head of School to compain of this, either. Although things were still going relatively well when I left in 2016, and I was optimistic for the future of the School then, there were severe risks to its financial stability if student recruitment dived. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened. Falling student numbers – especially from overseas – left the institution very vulnerable, especially since the fee per student did not change. That problem was exacerbated by a burst of inflation. AlthoughIt has clearly been a very difficult time for the University of Sussex, largely due to national and international forces beyond its control, but exacerbated by ineffective, and at times incompetent, institutional management. It should be said also that many University leaders enthusiastically embraced the fees-based system that has led their institutions where they are now, though most of them have now departed and left others to carry the can.
It worries me that Maynooth University is also trying to grow very quickly, without adequate investment in infrastructure especially teaching. It isn’t increasing the number of academic staff much either, preferring to hire more and more managers; yet another such position was advertised this week. I don’t know whether Maynooth’s financial trajectory will follow that of Sussex. The funding environment is very different in Ireland compared to the UK, so it may not. It is clear that the enviroment for education and research here is being steadily degraded by the current leadership.
Anyway, when I saw the announcement about Sussex, I checked other Universities I’ve worked in over the years. There’s a list here. It seems that while there are particular factors at play at Sussex, there are similar difficulties across the Board. Cardiff University has a deficit of £35 million and the VC has refused to rule out compulsory redundancies there. I’m not sure how this is all affecting the School of Physics & Astronomy. Nottingham University, where I worked from 1999 to 2007, has deficit of £30 million, in response to which it has opened a voluntary severance scheme, introduced hiring freezes, cut non-pay budgets, and refused to renew 500 fixed-term contracts.
There certainly are cold winds blowing across the University landscape in the United Kingdom, and there is no sign of any respite. This is just the start.
We’re in Week 9 of teaching in the Autumn Semester at Maynooth University, which means we’ve got one eye on the forthcoming Examination Period, which starts on 10th January 2025. Examination papers have already been prepared in draft form, and are now being checked ahead of printing. A draft examination timetable has also been released to staff, but not yet to students in case it has to be revised because of clashes.
I’m still on schedule with both my modules to finish the actual content in time to do use the last week for revision classes, going through past examination papers and generally helping the students prepare for the ordeals of January. There is a continuously-assessed component of both my modules, which counts 20% of the overall grade. One purpose of these assignments is to give the students some practice at the sort of problems they might encounter in the examinations: if they can do the assignments, they shouldn’t be too fazed by the examination questions. The purpose of the coursework is not just about passing examinations, however. I think the only way really to learn about mathematical physics is by doing it; the coursework is at least as important as the lectures and tutorials in terms of actually learning the subject. I think that modern higher education involves drastic over-assessment. Too much emphasis on grades and scores can be detrimental to real learning, but assessment that is formative can be extremely beneficial. Continuous assessment provides a way to give feedback to students on how they are doing, and to lecturers on how well the message is getting across; giving grades to such coursework is really just an incentive to the students to do it. It’s not primarily intended to be summative.
Anyway, back to examinations. One big difference between our examinations in Theoretical Physics in Maynooth and those at other institutions at which I’ve taught (in the UK) is that most of the papers here offer no choice of questions to be answered. Elsewhere it is quite common to find a choice of two or three questions from four or five on the paper. In my module on Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, for example, there are four questions on the examination paper and students have to do all of them for full marks.
One advantage of our system is that it makes it much harder for students to question-spot in the hope that they can get a good grade by only revising a fraction of the syllabus. If they’re well designed, a few longish questions can cover most of the syllabus for a module, which they have to in order to test all the learning outcomes. To accomplish this, questions can be split into parts that may be linked to each other to a greater or lesser extent in order to explore the connections between different ideas, but also sufficiently separate that a student who can’t do one part can still have a go at others. With such a paper, however, it is a dangerous strategy for a student to focus only on selected parts of the material in order to pass.
As an examiner, the Maynooth style of examination also has the advantage that you don’t have to worry too much if one question turns out to be harder than the others. That can matter if different students attempt different questions, as students might be penalized if they chose a particularly hard one, but not if everyone has to do everything.
But it’s not just the number of questions that’s important, it’s the duration. I’ve never felt that it was even remotely sensible for undergraduate physics examinations to be speed tests, which was often the case when I was a student. Why the need for time pressure? It’s better to be correct than to be fast, I think. I always try to set examination questions that could be done inside two hours by a student who knew the material, including plenty of time for checking so that even a student who made a mistake would have time to correct it and get the right answer. If a student does poorly in this style of examination it will be because they haven’t prepared well enough rather than because they weren’t fast enough.
We’re about two-thirds of the way into the Autumn Semester here at Maynooth and, by a miracle, I’m just about on schedule with both the modules I’m teaching. It’s always difficult to work out how long things are going to need for explanation when you’re teaching them for the first time.
One of the modules I’m doing is Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering Students. I’ve been on the bit following the “and” for a couple of weeks already. The first transform method covered was the Laplace transform, which I remember doing as a physics undergraduate but have used only rarely. Now I’m doing Fourier Series, as a prelude to Fourier transforms.
As I have observed periodically, the differential equations and transform methods are not at all disconnected, but are linked via the heat equation, the solution of which led Joseph Fourier to devise his series in Mémoire sur la propagation de la chaleur dans les corps solides (1807), a truly remarkable work for its time that inspired so many subsequent developments.
In the module I’m teaching, the applications are rather different from when I taught Fourier series to Physics students. Engineering students at Maynooth primarily study electronic engineering and robotics, so there’s a much greater emphasis on using integral transforms for signal processing. The mathematics is the same, of course, but some of the terminology is different from that used by physicists.
Anyway I was looking for nice demonstrations of Fourier series to help my class get to grips with them when I remembered this little video recommended to me some time ago by esteemed Professor George Ellis. It’s a nice illustration of the principles of Fourier series, by which any periodic function can be decomposed into a series of sine and cosine functions.
This reminds me of a point I’ve made a few times in popular talks about astronomy. It’s a common view that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion according to which which the planets move in elliptical motion around the Sun, is a completely different formulation from the previous Ptolemaic system which involved epicycles and deferents and which is generally held to have been much more complicated.
The video demonstrates however that epicycles and deferents can be viewed as the elements used in the construction of a Fourier series. Since elliptical orbits are periodic, it is perfectly valid to present them in the form of a Fourier series. Therefore, in a sense, there’s nothing so very wrong with epicycles. I admit, however, that a closed-form expression for such an orbit is considerably more compact and elegant than a Fourier representation, and also encapsulates a deeper level of physical understanding. What makes for a good physical theory is, in my view, largely a matter of economy: if two theories have equal predictive power, the one that takes less chalk to write it on a blackboard is the better one!
Anyway, soon I’ll be moving onto the complex Fourier series and thence to Fourier transforms which is familiar territory, but I have to end the module with the Z-transform, which I have never studied and never used. That should be fun!
Amid all the excitement last week I forgot that it was the sixth teaching week of the Semester. That means that we’re now past the halfway point. Among other things that meant that examination papers were due in on Friday (8th November). That means two papers for each module I’m teaching, one to be sat in January and another for the repeat opportunity in August, so that’s four altogether.
I always find setting examination questions very difficult. In theoretical physics we want to stretch the stronger candidates at the same time as allowing the weaker ones to show what they can do. It’s a perennial problem how to make the questions neither too easy nor too difficult, but it is compounded this time by the fact that I’m teaching two modules for the very first time so judging the right level is tricky.
Another issue is that I’m once again in a situation in which I have to set examination papers without having taught all the material. At least I’ve covered the first half of the content so I have some idea of what the students found difficult, but that’s not the case for the second half. It should be a bit easier next year once I’ve experience of covering the whole syllabus. Assuming, of course, that I’m teaching the same modules again next year, which is by no means guaranteed…
I’m teaching a module on Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for 4th year students and just about ready to switch to the part that comes after the and. I taught a bit of Complex Analysis when I was at Sussex and I’m quite looking forward to it, although it does pose a particular challenge. Some of the class are doing a Double Major in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, and have done quite a lot of Complex Analysis before, while others are doing a Single Major in Theoretical Physics and haven’t really done any. I have to somehow find a way to satisfy these two different groups. The only way I can think of to do that is to teach the subject as a physicist rather than a pure mathematician, with an emphasis on examples and real-world applications rather than in the abstract. We’ll see how this works out over the next few weeks.
P.S. On the subject of Complex Analysis, I just remembered this post from a few years ago.
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In the Dark 