Your labs will be graded entirely based on what is written down in your lab notebooks. You will need to purchase two 8.5x11 hardbound notebooks, as one will be used while the other is graded.
Your notebook should contain a record of everything which you do in your lab. The idea is that one of your peers (or you, six months later) should be able to completely reproduce your research and verify your results starting from scratch. Thus it must contain a reasonably thorough description of your experiment and analysis (including objectives, process, diagrams, observations, and logs), be clearly written, legible and contain all of the work you performed and important data used to arrive at your final results.
Nothing should ever be erased from a notebook. If you make a mistake, or realize that you have bad data, draw a single line through the parts to be ignored, and annotate the page with a comment to explain why. Ideally, you would write a description, potentially on another page, detailing just what mistake you made and what you have done to correct it. Often in experiments, documenting your mistakes is more important than documenting your successes. If you made a mistake, chances are somebody else would make this mistake as well.
We will not be requiring formal lab reports because we would rather you spend the time actually thinking about and doing your lab. You are required to have many of the elements of a lab report in your lab book for full credit, however. The rough grading scheme is as follows.
The order in which these appear in your log book is up to you, as long as the sections are clearly labelled and legible.
Here you describe the objectives and write a short proposal for how to perform the experiment, subject to the available materials and equipment.
You are required to write this section in your notebook before you come to the lab, so that you understand at the start what it is you will be doing. Have your TA check off the introduction.
The first few minutes of a new lab will be devoted to a discussion of everyone's experimental design, so that everyone understand the various approaches.
This section should also contain the following:
Setup and Design
A detailed description of the equipment and procedure will probably need to be written after you are done, but you should try to explain roughly the procedure and equipment before you begin. As your procedure evolves during the course of your lab (ideally you will try out several ideas until you find one that really works well) you should be keeping a written record of what you are doing and what has changed. You should always date entries in your log book so that you can reconstruct what you did and when. After you have taken all of your data, you should additionally write a concise description of the final equipment and procedure if your running narrative is confusing. Remember, somebody else should be able to reproduce what you have done with nothing more than your log book. Helpful information can include the following:
It is important to label your figures and drawings.
Your measurements should be arranged into neat tables with units, uncertainties, and captions describing just what exactly is in each table. If you change the conditions or equipment during your lab, record that fact clearly and put the new data in a new table. If your data are taken by computer, you can either print out a copy of the data and paste it into your log book, or else save the data to some place you can find it again, and write down exactly where it is in your log book. The TA doesn't necessarily need to be able to find the data, but you do! You should include at least one example table or plot of your raw data for every lab, even if all of the data is stored on a computer. Computers crash, hard drives fail, laptops are stolen, and data will be lost. All of your instructors have had all of these happen to them! If you have a paper record to at least indicate the type of data you acquired, you can always replace it at a later date.
Remember to include some estimate of the uncertainties on your measurements, along with an appropriate number of significant digits. A more detailed discussion of uncertainties can be included in the analysis section.
This section will probably be written after the data is acquired, and should be organized around each of the experimental goals. For each goal, then:
Analysis without reasonable explanations involving words will cost you points! In other words, please don't hand in a sprawl of equations. Try to relate your analysis to the objectives stated at the start of the lab, and use the questions in the lab handout as a guide to direct your analysis.
A short summary section listing the physics principles addressed by your investigation(s), the results of your investigation(s), any procedural problems you encountered and how you solved them, and a short statement giving your impression of the lab and what you might do differently next time.
Each report will be graded according to the clarity and conciseness of the writing, the organization and thought put into describing the experiment and assumptions made, the quality and pertinence of diagrams, and the appropriateness and correctness of the interpretation and analysis as presented in the last two sections.
Having perfect data is not the primary goal in these labs. Having a clearly thought out set of objectives and a rationally designed experiment to meet these objectives is the primary goal. Feel free to be creative, as long as your ideas and rationale are clearly described.
The analysis and conclusion sections are intended to be an extension of what you do during your lab sessions, and ideally will not take a huge investment of time. If you find yourself spending hours each week "writing up" your labs, you need to change your lab procedure. The stuff you write down during you lab session should cover the requirements for the majority of the notebook contents I listed above. Scribbling stuff down on a sheet of paper and transcribing it into your notebook later is simply not acceptable lab procedure.
Ultimately, everyone develops their own style of lab notebook management, and for most physicists, this style evolves throughout their professional career. The key thing to remember, however, is that you can never put enough detail into your notebook. You would be surprised at how quickly you forget things.