- Proposal 1: The department will implement “pass-out” examinations for the core courses, to be given at the start of each course, to determine whether a student has sufficient mastery of basic material to be excused that particular core course. (The core courses are here defined to be: PHYS 500 Dynamics, PHYS 502 Electromagnetic Theory, PHYS 506 Mathematical Methods of Physics, PHYS 508 Quantum Mechanics I, PHYS 512 Statistical Physics I, and PHYS 608 Quantum Mechanics II.) To be eligible to take this exam a student must have had a more-or-less equivalent-level course elsewhere. The exam will be administered by the DGS and the previous year’s lecturer of the course in question. This proposal was overwhelmingly popular amoung students.
- Proposal 2: PHYS 500 Dynamics will remain a required course. Its content will be further updated in consultation with all interested parties. The majority student opinion recognized that PHYS 500 had evolved in recent years to cover more advanced topics, but held that it should move even further in that direction, with even less of a review of undergraduate material. The majority of students thought that such a more-advanced-topics PHYS 500 should remain a required course.
- Proposal 3: PHYS 602 Classical Field Theory will no longer be a required course. All required electromagnetism will be covered in one semester in EM I.This proposal was overwhelming popular among the experimental students. Theory students held mixed opinions.
- Proposal 4: In consultation with the interested parties the 2-4 Project committee will decide on a proposal as to how best to present and coordinate classes in General Relativity.
- Proposal 5: The requirement to take QFT I or MBT I will become a requirement to take one of QFT I, MBT I, or a renormalization-group-based Statistical Mechanics II. QFT II and MBT II will also be satisfactory substitutes for the requirement, for students who have taken QFT or MBT, prior to coming to Yale. This proposal is predicated on second quantization being taught in QM II.
- Proposal 6: The department will specify what are the basic, essential concepts of physics at the graduate level. This will amount to guidelines for the topics covered in the core courses and the Qualifying Exam. The 2-4 Project Committee in consultation with the interested parties will provide a draft of these guidelines.
- Proposal 7: The requirement on first-year graduate students to take PHYS 504Lb will be modified to become a requirement to take either PHYS 504Lb or a laboratory-based special investigation (SI) (PHYS 991a,b), supervised by a particular faculty advisor. Either course must be completed in the first year of graduate study. To be able to chose the SI option, the student must have previously taken an advanced undergraduate laboratory class, and will be required to write a brief proposal specifying what the SI project is. The SI project must be approved by the DGS. In addition, a Powerpoint or similar presentation on the SI would be required at the end of the semester, graded by a 3 faculty panel. This proposal was overwhelmingly popular with students. Faculty opinion held that it was essential that this requirement be met in the first year of graduate study and that the option to do an SI only makes sense if the student has previously had an advanced undergraduate laboratory.
- Proposal 8: If deemed necessary by the subfield, each subfield will determine a set of preferred courses, that represents a guide for the courses that students in that subfield will likely take beyond the core courses. At the same time, each subfield will examine the current slate of courses and if necessary develop new courses to present the material that will enable students to enter research effectively, and ensure they are regularly given. In some areas, collaboration with other departments will make a lot of sense. In other cases, there will be courses that are common to several subfields.
Rationale.
For many incoming students, the current core classes are appropriate. For better-prepared incoming students, however, repetition of material that they’ve previously mastered elsewhere delays the taking of more advanced and interesting courses and delays entry into research. It emerged in several of the questionnaire responses that students found some of the material of the core courses repetitive of undergraduate material, leading to considerable dissatisfaction.
Currently, it is possible at the discretion of the DGS for a student to replace a core course with an elective. However, this is a subjective judgement with lots of possibility for error either way. An exam, based on material from the previous years’ course, that permits students to place out would be more objective and fairer. This motivates Proposal 1.
In the questionnaires, a significant fraction of the respondents indicated that some of material in PHYS 500 was repetitive of what they had already studied as undergraduates. This motivates Proposal 2.
Proposal 3 is motivated by the uncertain focus of CFT, and the opinion among student respondents that it was of doubtful value in later research.
Proposal 4 follows from the observation that, on one hand, General Relativity is increasingly important in a number of subfields, while, on the other, currently, the teaching of GR within the department has become distributed among several courses, including Math. Methods, Classical Field Theory, PHYS 538a, and PHYS 680a.
In essence the QFT/MBT requirement is a requirement to have taken a class that involves Feynmann diagrams. Proposal 5 expands the list of courses that are consistent with this, but which may be preferable for some subfields, in particular, for soft-condensed matter physics.
At one level, Proposal 6 addresses the student-expressed concern that there is a mismatch between what is taught in the core courses and what is tested on the Qualifying Exam. Beyond this, however, in view of the increased diversity of Physics and the department, it seems valuable to indeed specify the essentials.
Since physics is based on experiments, it is imperative for all physics PhD students to have some laboratory experience. PHYS 504Lb is appropriate for incoming PhD students without sufficiently advanced undergraduate laboratory experience. Currently, students can be excused from PHYS 504Lb at the discretion of the DGS if they can demonstrate an equivalent previous class. This procedure too is fraught with objectivity and fairness issues. For students who have had prior laboratory experience, Proposal 7 propels them into a real research environment earlier than previously and it gives them credit for it. This is not a “soft option”. The reason for insisting on a proposal and a final presentation is to ensure that the SI is a genuine educational experience, in which the student is invested in the research of the host group. Having a faculty group examine the outcome of the SI addresses one of the perceived weaknesses of the SI/rotation process in other science departments, namely that students who perform poorly in SIs are not given proper feedback, so that they remain unaware of what is expected of them in a research context. This problem was particularly emphasized in the Engelmann report. Such a group review also permits a wider range of potential advisors to get to know the student.