Math 250:C1 Spring 2005, Professor Bumby

Some links

• main course page.
• semester course page, with links to Matlab projects and suggested syllabus and homework.
• Lecturer's Home Page. Look here for information about office hours, including extra hours at the end of term.

Announcements

• Starting with the second class on Monday, Jan. 24, there will be a quiz in each class unless there is an exam scheduled for that class.
• The department syllabus is modified for this section to have all Matlab assignments due on Wednesday. It is expected that the graded labs will be returned at the next class.
• The time of the second exam is also shifted one class meeting. The current calendar of major dates is in the next section.
• Although the quiz on March 21 will be based on section 4.3, there was time on March 9 to begin chapter 5. The content of Section 5.1 is easily replaced by material done later, so the quiz on March 23 will be based on topics from Section 5.2. We are now two sections ahead of schedule. This should allow us to get into chapter 6 before the second exam, but the content of that exam will be confined to chapters 3, 4, and 5.
• Quiz 17 on March 30 will be based on a second class on section 5.3 The topic will be Markov matrices, following an example done in class. This topic also appears in section 5.5 of the textbook and is mentioned in Lab 5. It should be noted that there are more than a quarter of a million 3-by-3 examples whose entries are single-digit decimals (the exact number is 66³=287496), and all of these are easily solved by ad hoc methods loosely based on the row operations used to solve general systems.
• Exam 2 on April 11 will deal with chapters 3, 4, and 5 and be based on quizzes 10 thru 17.
• Quiz 20 on April 13 will revisit the content of quiz 19 since the general response to that quiz was unsatisfactory.

Calendar

• Wednesday, January 19. First Class.
• Monday, January 24. Second class; first quiz.
• Wednesday, February 02. Matlab Lab 1 due.
• Wednesday, February 16. Matlab Lab 2 due.
• Wednesday, February 23. Exam 1. Chapters 1 and 2. No books, papers or calculators may be used on the exam.
• Wednesday, March 02. Matlab Lab 3 due.
• Wednesday, March 23. Matlab Lab 4 due.
• Wednesday, April 06. Matlab Lab 5 due.
• Monday, April 11. Exam 2. Chapters 3, 4, 5. No books, papers or calculators may be used on the exam.
• Wednesday, April 20. Matlab Lab 6 due.
• Tuesday, May 10, Noon - 3PM in ARC-333 (the regular classroom), Final exam.

Exams

The first exam has been graded. The median score was 87 and the average was 84.17. Results were generally good, but Warnings were recorded for those with exam scores below 80. As the scatter plots below show, grades is this range usually indicate weakness in quizzes or Matlab projects.
These plots also include a trend line showing how the earlier work in quizzes or lab projects predict the exam score.

The second exam has been graded. The median score was 86 and the average was 80.87. The scatter plot shows a comparison of the two exams and a trend line showing the predicted score on the second exam for each score on the first exam.

Now that we have all labs, all quizzes, and all class exams, we have plots relating lab scores to exam scores (the first plot) and relating the quiz scores to the exam scores . As an illustration of the use of the least squares method, the best fitting polynomials of degree 2 and 3 were also found and are included in this plot.

The final exam is completely graded. In determining letter grades for the course, the following quantities were added together: (1) one-quarter of the total of the 25 quizzes, capped at 50 points (this did not prevent anyone with total quiz scores over 200 from getting an A); the total score on Matlab projects, including extra credit points, capped at 175 to allow extra points here to transfer a limited benefit to the rest of the course (10 grades were above 175, and 5 more were between 150 and 175); each midterm as scored (maximum 100); the final exam as scored (with maximum 200); a limited number of bonus points to reward a near perfect final exam or to allow good work on quizzes and exams to offset an excessive penalty from a missing computer project. Course grades were submitted Thursday afternoon, May 12, and entered in the FAS Gradebook. To see how the grades were distributed, here is a scatter plot showing the relation between all classwork (including bonus points) and the final exam score. A trend line and lines showing the letter grade divisions at totals of (A) 550 (B+) 510 (B) 460 (C) are included. No grades of C+ were assigned and there were no failing grades.