Math 250-19 Spring 2002

The mathematics department has the use of HH-B7 as a home away from home on the College Avenue Campus, and I will have office there (with several others) from 6:30 to 7:30 PM on Tuesday. If these times, or my scheduled office hours on Monday afternoon or Thursday morning in Hill Center (see my home page for details), are not convenient, you should feel free to make an appointment. End of term office hours are announced on that page.

The final exam will be distributed as a list of problems that you can keep with answers to be written in blue books. The exam will be composed just in time, so the number of problems cannot be announced. However, the exam will be designed to be graded on the basis of 200 points with problems weighted as on the midterm exams.

As described at the first class, the pace of the course in this section will be maintained by giving a 10 point quiz early in the period at each lecture. The quiz topic will be chosen from the general homework list, announced during the preceding lecture and recorded on this page. Homework will not be collected, but the quiz will assume that you have done enough of the problems to be sure that you could do any similar problem. You may also ask questions about the homework before the quiz.

The first midterm exam

The first hour exam is currently scheduled for Thursday, February 21. This is the time suggested by the standard syllabus. It will cover Chapters 1, 3, and 4 (except Section 3.3). The regular class meeting will be used.

Any difficulty with this time should be reported promptly, either in class or by e-mail.

The exam scores were high with an average of 83.03. The few grades lower than 75, or with a combined score of exam and quizzes lower than 115 should be considered unsatisfactory. To help assess performance, there is a scatter plot showing the relation between quiz grades and the exam grade (which also shows zones of grades: superior [A/B+]; satisfactory [B/C]; and unsatisfactory [D/F]) and scaled averages (formed my dividing by the maximum possible score [or base score ] and multiplying by 10) for each problem. For this exam, the scaled average is half of actual average, but scaling allows comparison of problems with different base scores.

The second midterm exam

The general syllabus calls for a second exam covering Chapters 6 and 7 during the twentieth meeting of the class. For this section, the twentyfirst meeting on April 9 is a better date. The content will remain the same. Problems should resemble those on quizzes 10 through 18.

The average for the second exam was 74.17. A table of scaled averages follows (scaling the maximum possible score to 10 allows comparison of problems with different weights). Prob. # Scaled Avg. 1 6.59 2 7.09 3 7.79 4 6.03 5 8.88 6 7.02

The final exam

There were a large number of high grades on the final exam, resulting in an average of 168.8 out of 200. A table of scaled averages follows (scaling the maximum possible score to 10 allows comparison of problems with different weights).

Prob. #	Scaled Avg.
1	9.41
2	9.64
3	8.91
4	7.07
5	9.41
6	8.74
7	8.63
8	8.10
9	8.52
10	7.48
11	6.20

Course grades followed the large number of near-perfect (better than 190 points, including one grade of 200) final exams. In assigning course grades, the first step was to identify large gaps in the total score (out of 500 points), but the scatter plot gave a finer view of patterns of grades that was be used identify the more significant gaps in this ranking. The grade distribution is tabulated here. The Range column show attained scores, so that gaps between ranges will be visible. The Count column shows the number of students with grades in that range. No one taking the final exam received a grade lower than C for the course; the distinction between grades assigned to fill the space on other lines of the roster are not important here, and are simply classified as Other at the bottom of the table.

Grade	Range	Count
A	434-484.5	12
B+	407-429.5	5
B	379-392	3
C+	350.5-373.5	5
C	312-327	3
Other		5

Topics forQuizzes

Note that the order of topics from Chapter 9 is reversed from the standard syllabus with section 9.4 being treated before section 9.2. The special properties of symmetric matrices are important in the application to quadratic forms so this section should be kept close to section 8.3. The applications to differential equations involve more general properties of eigenvectors, so it will fit better as an introduction to the general review that will end the course.

Final Exam and Course Grades

Exams will be given numerical grades only; letter grades will be assigned at the end of the course based on a ranking of all graded work. Unofficial, and probably incomplete, projections of letter grades will be made after each hour exam. After the first exam, the projection will emphasize the distinction between satisfactory (C or better) and unsatisfactory (D or F) work. After the second exam, it should be possible to identify a distinction between good (A, B+ or B) and passing (C+ or C) work. The ranking will be composed of 200 points from the final exam, 100 from each midterm, and 100 points representing half the total of the best 20 quizzes.