Math 244 Fall 2002 Sections 1-3 Professor Bumby

Some links

• main course page.
• semester course page.
• Lecturer's Home Page.
• Recitation Instructor's Course Page.
• Notes prepared for Math 252 on the matrix exponential in the case of complex eigenvalues. The lecture on November 4 used this approach to material in sections 7.6 and 7.7 of the textbook.

Calendar

• Wednesday, September 04. First Lecture: Begin segment on chapters 1 (Generalities) and 2 (First order equations). Maple Lab 0 (Practice Lab) assigned. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 0.
• Thursday, September 05. First Recitation class.
• Wednesday, September 18. Maple Lab 0 due, Lab 1 assigned. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 1.
• Wednesday, September 25. Exam 1, covering chapters 1 (Generalities) and 2 (First order equations). Some lecture time will have been devoted to Chapter 8 (Numerical methods) because the topic is related to Maple Labs, but this material is not suitable for exams.
• Monday, October 07. Maple Lab 1 due, Lab 2 assigned. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 2.
• Wednesday, October 23. Exam 2, covering chapters 3 (Second Order Linear Equations) and 4 (Higher Order Linear Equations).
• Monday, October 28. Maple Lab 2 due, Lab 3 assigned. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 3.
• Wednesday, November 13. Maple Lab 3 due, Lab 4 assigned. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 4.
• Monday, November 18. Exam 3, covering chapters 5 (Series Solution) and 7 (Systems).
• Monday, December 02. Maple Lab 4 due. This is the last Maple Lab that will be assigned, although Lab 5 is available. Some of the material in Lab 5 may be useful in your work on chapter 9, but the schedule is too tight to allow the lab to prepared for grading. Here are links to description and seed file for Lab 5. New (December 2002) The math department web server now defines all files with extension mws as mime-type application/x-maple. This means that you can configure your web browser to do something useful when you click on the link to such a file. In Netscape, select preferences from the edit menu, expand the Navigator submenu an select Applications. This will allow you to add this type and instruct the browser to Save to Disk. It is also possible to have the browser start xmaple, but this is not recommended on eden because Netscape reserves too many colors for its own use and this causes Maple to behave strangely.
• Monday, December 09. Exam 4, covering chapter 9 (Nonlinear Systems).
• Wednesday, December 11. Last day of classes.
• Monday, December 23, 12 - 3 PM. Final exam. Only topics appearing on class exams will be included on the final.

Grading

The course grades will be based on a ranking on a 700 point scale composed of the following items:

• Four class exams, 80 points each, total 320. Expected time for each class exam will be 60 minutes. This allows time before the exam for last minute questions and a preview of the next segment of the course. This buffer will protect the exam from being disrupted by students arriving a little late.
• One three hour final exam, total 200.
• Four graded Maple Labs, 20 points each, total 80.
• Recitation grade, graded homework and possibly some quizzes, total 100.

An effort will be made to respect any clustering of grades in assigning course grades.

Here is a scatter plot comparing grades on the two exams. If you want to check the grades that I have recorded for you, you can find exam scores in the FAS Gradebook. The average on exam 1 was 58.595 out of 80 and the average on exam 2 was 63.819 out of 80. For each exam, there are also scaled averages (formed my dividing by the maximum possible score [or base score ] and multiplying by 10) for each problem. Scaling allows easy comparison of the difficulty of problems of different weight.

Here is a scatter plot comparing grades on the third exam with the sum of scores on the first two exams. If you want to check the grades that I have recorded for you, you can find exam scores in the FAS Gradebook. The average for the exam was 53.169 out of 80. Information about the scores on individual problems for exam 3 is in the following table. All information is based on scores for students taking exam 3 at the scheduled time. In the scatter plot, this allowed the graph to be limited to a combined score of at least 60 on the first two exams.

Here is a scatter plot comparing grades on the fourth exam with the sum of scores on the first three exams. If you want to check the grades that I have recorded for you, you can find exam scores in the FAS Gradebook. The average for this exam was 62.507 out of 80.

Exam 3

Prob. #	Scaled Avg.
1	8.12
2	8.18
3	8.05
4	6.68
5	8.21

Here is a scatter plot comparing final exam grades with the sum of all scores during the term. If you want to check the grades that I have recorded for you, you can find exam scores in the FAS Gradebook. This includes the letter grade for the course. The grades of all students who did not complete the course (and one who did, but was far below the scale of the rest of the class) were excluded. The aspect was adjusted so that lines of slope -1 give equal totals on the 700 point scale used for course grades. After this plot was prepared, some grades were adjusted to compensate for missing, or unusually low, scores on class exams based on the corresponding portion of the final exam. This means that the gaps between clusters of grades may be in slightly different places than this plot suggests. I expect to add more information about grade distribution soon.

The two plots above show the relation between results on Maple labs or recitation work and the class exams. The positive slope of the trend lines in both cases tends to confirm our claim that attention to routine work is good preparation for exams.