Placement Exam
A written placement exam will be administered in the orientation week before the start of classes in the Fall semester. Graduate students entering in the fall should plan on arrival before the last week of August, which is reserved for required Teaching Assistant training and other on-boarding activities.
The purpose of the Placement Exam is to ensure the success of all students admitted to our Ph.D. program by providing individualized guidance on courses for optimal development. Our experience is that the admissions process successfully identifies students with the appropriate ability, but does not guarantee uniformity in preparation of the talented individuals admitted to our program.
The exam will consist of problems typical of those found in our introductory and advanced undergraduate courses in mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. The exam will have two parts, each 3 hours in length. Part I will cover mechanics and electromagnetism; Part II will cover quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics.
Following the exam, the results are first discussed by a small faculty group, consisting of members of the placement exam and graduate advising committees; this is followed by individual meetings between each student and the DGS. During that meeting, if the examination identified a likely gap in a student’s preparation at a level that would prevent successful completion of one or more of the required graduate courses, the student and the DGS decide on a course of action to remedy the gap. Examples range from student self-study (in case the gap is small) to successfully completing the corresponding undergraduate course(s) before taking the corresponding graduate course(s). The DGS will also review core graduate course midterm scores in the Fall semester and contact students who appear at risk of obtaining a course grade below the required B-.
The results of the placement exam become part of the student’s departmental record; they are reviewed in a faculty meeting later in the Fall semester."
The level of the material covered by the Placement Exam and the mapping onto our undergraduate courses are as follows:
• Mechanics, Physics GU4003: Classical Mechanics, Goldstein, Poole and Safko.
• Electromagnetism, Physics GU3007-3008: Introduction to Electrodynamics, Griffiths.
• Quantum Mechanics, Physics GU4021-4022: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Griffiths; A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, Townsend.
• Statistical Mechanics, Physics GU4023: An Introduction to Thermal Physics, Schroeder; Thermal Physics, Kittel and Kroemer.
Please note that this guidance is intended to be descriptive, not proscriptive. There are many other excellent textbooks for each of these subjects
Previous Placement Exams