Homework and exams in PHYS 683

The course grade (s/u) will be determined by your completion of weekly homework assignments. There will be no formal examinations.

With regard to the homework assignments, we expect you to follow two rules:

• For every problem separately, indicate all your sources;
• There will be a subset of problems for which you are encouraged to work independently.

These two rules are elaborated below.

The material you hand in should reflect your own ideas. You can form these ideas by thinking about the assignment yourself, by discussion with others, or after consultation of books or articles. In any case, you should acknowledge all sources for each problem separately. Acknowledging all sources is essential in all of your scientific work, so it is good to start this habit now. It is fine to indicate the type of input you received, e.g., "consulted book W", "discussions with X", "worked together with Y", or "was alerted to this point by Z". Although it is uncommon in a scientific publication to write explicitly that you worked all by yourself, for this course please indicate explicitly even if there are no sources to acknowledge.

As for any advanced course, not all students taking this course will be able or willing to complete the homework assignments with the same level of independence. For example, an experimentalist attending this course to broaden her/his knowledge of certain areas in theoretical condensed matter physics may prefer to collaborate with others on more mathematical problems, whereas a student expecting to graduate as a theoretical physicist probably wants to solve more problems alone. In order to give you some guidance when deciding whether or not to discuss problems with others, we will single out a number of problems on which you are encouraged to work independently. You are encouraged to discuss the other problems with your peers. Although we are serious about it, this is only an incentive to work independently on a subset of the problems, not an absolute command. You should feel free to complete each problem at a level of independence that suits your circumstances and abilities, as long as you mention your sources on the work you submit.