Course Policies

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(Nothing not covered below.)

Course Policies

Based on the syllabus.

Mathematica?

Installing Mathematica should go smoothly if you follow CIT’s instructions. You will need to sign up for a Wolfram account, and may get an access code along the way, but those things should be straightforward and happen semi-automatically. Let me know if this is not the case.

What you need to know about Mathematica will be covered in class.

Grading

Highlights of grading, as demonstrated by looking at the hypothetical grades recorded in Canvas for “Test Student”:

• Grades as students see them are organized by learning outcome; each outcome has a grade between 0 and 4.
• Those grades are averages of grades earned for that outcome on specific problem sets; the comments associated with the grade show what those grades were.
• The average is of the most recent grade for the outcome, and the highest two earlier grades for it.
• In general, every outcome will have grades from multiple problem sets, and every problem set will contribute to multiple outcomes. Every problem set will list the outcomes it addresses at the beginning.
• There’s a general rubric for grading an outcome in the syllabus. In particular…
  • The grade reflects not only getting the right answers, but also being able to explain how you got them.
  • Being able to do one of these things but not the other, or being able to do both on half or slightly less of the relevant problems, is the benchmark for a grade of 2 out of 4 points.
  • Being able to explain is slightly more important than correct answers though, in that you can get 3 out of 4 points if you consistently explain how to solve problems but make mistakes in carrying out those ideas.
• Within a problem set, there will typically be several problems that address each outcome, you don’t necessarily have to do perfectly on all of them to get a good grade for the outcome as a whole.
• I keep a spreadsheet of grades parallel to Canvas (Canvas doesn’t have a good way to do the “average of most recent and highest 2 previous grades” calculation, so that’s one of the main things my spreadsheet does). But Canvas excludes outcomes with no grades yet from its total grade, whereas my spreadsheet treats them as 0s. This means that early in the semester, when relatively few outcomes have grades, my spreadsheet and Canvas will differ considerably in what they think your total is. Assuming that you continue to do about as well on future work as you have on past work, Canvas’s total is a rough prediction of where you’ll end the semester, whereas mine is a rough lower bound on how you’ll do. Later in the semester, the two grades will converge. I’m always willing to talk with you about how I interpret all of these numbers and what I think they’ll translate to in terms of an eventual letter grade.

True or false: “Even if I don’t turn in homeworks or come to class, I can still scrape by if I get passing grades on the tests.”

This is false. There are no traditional tests in this class. Instead, each problem set has elements of a low-stakes, mini-test, built into it. This is captured by the phrase “distributed oral exams.” It’s also why meeting in real time to talk about each problem set is an essential part of grading. The net effect, as far as I can tell from past semesters, is to reduce exam stress, but also to make the problem sets super important. While mastery grading gives you a lot of flexibility re problem sets — you can redo them, you can turn them in late, etc. — you absolutely must grade all (or at least almost all) of them by the end of the semester.

Textbook

Where do you go to buy it?

You don’t, it’s free online.

If you find a mistake in the textbook, is there anything you can do about it?

Yes. Tell me about mistakes you find, and I can probably fix them in the textbook.

We took a quick look online at how it’s organized.

Office Hours

When are my weekend office hours?

There are none. While I try to have very open office hours during the day Monday to Friday, I tend to be protective of time outside that block because I need it to do the things I can’t do while holding office hours during the days.

Next

3-dimensional coordinate systems.

Please read “Three-Dimensional Coordinate Systems,” “Distance in R³,” and “Writing Equations in R³,” all from section 1.2 of the book.

Remember that “read” doesn’t mean study it until you understand it all perfectly. It means study it — all of it — until you feel prepared to come to class with either (or both of) questions to ask about what you read, or one or more key ideas from the reading that you can identify in a sentence or phrase. Discussions and in-class problems will give you a chance to improve your understanding from the reading, and problem sets and discussion of them will eventually give you a chance to get even better.

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