G483/G486 Practical Skills in Physics 1 and 2

Credit

These units are worth 60 UMS, which equates to 20% of the AS credit or 10% of the A2 credit.

Assessment

It is examined by three practical tasks (see below), which are set by OCR but delivered and marked by your physics teachers. OCR actually release nine such tasks each year and so it is possible to do more than three and then choose your best marks to submit. The three tasks together are worth 40 (raw) marks.

Qualitative tasks

One of the three tasks that you submit must be one of the three so-called qualitative tasks. These tasks might, for instance, assess your ability to carry out a practical procedure to collect data, recognise a pattern and then apply some physical reasoning to explain the pattern.

This type of task is worth 10 of the 40 (raw) marks.

Quantative tasks

One of the three tasks that you submit must be one of the three so-called quantative tasks. These tasks might, for instance, assess your ability to collect and carefully record data, plot a graph, deduce information from the graph (such as an intercept or a gradient) and then process this data in the context of a given model to calculate further derived quantities.

This type of task is worth 20 of the 40 (raw) marks.

Evaluative tasks

One of the three tasks that you submit must be one of the three so-called evaluative tasks. Each of these tasks are linked to one of the quantative tasks and might, for instance, ask you to calculate uncertainties in measured quantities and/or percentage uncertainties in compound variables. It is then normal to compare these percentage uncertainties to percentage differences from accepted values or to comment on the scatter of points about the line/curve of best fit in order to judge accuracy and/or reliability. Finally, most evaluative tasks require you to comment on the experimental method and to offer suggestions to improve it.

This type of task is worth 10 of the 40 (raw) marks.

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