Face-to-face activities (guided and supervised)

The course consists of two hours of lectures and one hour of problem-solving sessions per week.

In addition, eight hours of specialized seminars will be scheduled. During these seminars, each group will be divided into two subgroups in order to facilitate interaction between students and the teaching staff, who will supervise the activities. These activities will be assessed and will account for 10% of the final course grade.

The lectures will present the key concepts of special relativity, mechanics, and wave motion, together with the theoretical developments required to build, at an appropriate level, a coherent and well-structured body of knowledge that enables students to study applications and solve problems. These problems will be solved and discussed during the problem-solving sessions and the specialized seminars.

Non-face-to-face activities (independent study)

Students will have access to the material covered in the lectures and problem-solving sessions. In addition to the recommended textbooks (see the bibliography), they will have access, through the Virtual Campus, to the lecture slides and course notes, as well as to the problem sets that will be solved and discussed in class.

Note: Fifteen minutes of one class session, within the schedule established by the School or the Degree Programme, will be reserved for students to complete the teaching and course evaluation surveys.

Annotation: within the schedule set by the centre or degree programme, 15 minutes of one class will be reserved for students to evaluate their lecturers and their courses or modules through questionnaires.

The course will be assessed through three examination sessions. Each session will consist of a written examination including both theoretical questions and problems. In addition, during the first two examination periods, problems will be assigned during the seminars. These may be discussed in groups, when indicated, but must be submitted individually.

The first examination will cover Newtonian mechanics and mechanical waves. The second examination will cover special relativity and the remaining topics on waves.

Each part will contribute equally to the final grade. The course will be considered passed through continuous assessment if the geometric mean of the grades for the two parts (including the corresponding problem-set submissions) is at least 5.0 out of 10.

The third examination session (the resit examination) will consist of two written examinations, one for each part of the course. Students who have not passed one or both parts through continuous assessment must take only the corresponding examination(s). Students wishing to improve their grade may also take the resit examination. In this case, the grade obtained in the resit examination will replace the grade for the corresponding part, provided that the examination paper is submitted. The final course grade will then be recalculated as the geometric mean of the grades for the two parts.

To be eligible for the resit examination, students must have taken the corresponding two ordinary examination sessions. In addition, they must have obtained a minimum final grade of 3.5 out of 10. Students whose final grade is below 3.5 will fail the course.

The theoretical questions will be brief and will not require lengthy calculations. They are intended to assess students' conceptual understanding of the material covered in class.

The problems will be longer and will require more substantial calculations. They are intended to assess students' level of understanding, their ability to formulate mathematical solutions, and their computational skills. They will not necessarily be variations of problems solved in class.

Note 1. The two parts of the course are fundamental components of a physicist's education. A high grade in one part should not compensate for a very low grade in the other. For this reason, the geometric mean is used, since it penalizes significant imbalances between the two parts. When the two grades are similar, the difference with respect to the arithmetic mean is practically negligible; however, when they differ substantially, the geometric mean provides a more faithful measure of the overall achievement of the course learning objectives.

Note 2. Any irregularity committed during an assessment activity (including academic fraud, plagiarism, or the improper use of AI, unless such use is explicitly authorized in the course guide) that may lead to a significant alteration of the assessment outcome will result in that assessment activity being graded with a mark of 0. If the course guide establishes that obtaining a minimum grade in that assessment activity is a compulsory requirement for passing the course, or if multiple irregularities are detected in assessment activities of the same course, the final course grade will be 0. Without prejudice to these consequences, the corresponding disciplinary proceedings may also be initiated against the student responsible for such irregularities.