Date Select Query - Select Between Two Dates

have a table with students details in it, i want to select all the students who joined a class on a particular day and then i need another query to select all students who joined classes over the course of date range eg 03/12/2003 to 12/12/2003.

i have tried with the following query, i need help putting my queries together
select * from tblstudents where classID='1' and studentstartdate between ('03/12/2004') and ('03/12/2004')

when i run this query i get this message

Server: Msg 242, Level 16, State 3, Line 1
The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.

the studentstartdate field is set as datetime 8 and the date looks like this in the table 03/12/2004 03:12:15

please help
mustfa