Grading Policy

bob uses an Excel spreadsheet to calculate grades and posts them on BlackBoard periodically 
(check Blackboard grades here). Because the upload process from my Excel spreadsheet to BlackBoard is very tedious (see below), it will not always be up to date. It is your responsibility to make sure the grade entries agree with the grades on your paper quizzes and tests and Maple HW.

Here is a copy of the Excel spreadsheet with the lettergrade cutoffs:

•  U calculate your own Grade (click to open Excel spreadsheet)
  There are 9 weekly quizzes, 4 equally weighted tests (including the final exam), and a homework grade, weighted:
               Homework Avg 25%, Quiz avg 10%, Test avg 65%.
  The lowest quiz grade is dropped, and the lowest of first two test grades is dropped only if the subsequent test grade is higher. The final exam will be weighted simply as a fourth test. Thus only when the three test grades decrease monotonically will no test grade be dropped, so increasingly poor performance is penalized, while  improvement is rewarded.

The weekly quizzes are on material for which we have already discussed the homework in class and are graded in half points out of a total of 10 points each. There should be no surprises on quizzes, which are designed to assess a basic understanding of the key ideas following typical homework problems. To avoid stress, these are to be done outside of class over the weekend, with no restrictions what materials you consult except that no collaboration is allowed. These must be your own work. These are posted online in BlackBoard and handed out in paper form in class each Friday of normal 4 class day weeks to be turned in Monday during class usually. Email bob if you are not able to meet these deadlines or if you get stuck. These are meant to give you practice in communicating clearly problem solutions in standard math notation.

The homework will be done through WebAssign in BlackBoard (doing the homework is the only way for most students to engage the ideas and understand how they work in practice). The WebAssign homework offers many pluses---hopefully most of you will probably appreciate the immediate feedback and opportunity to retry a similar problem with slightly different numbers or see alternative problem solutions, and the opportunity to message me for help on any given problem. Problems are chosen from the textbook end of section exercises, although the problems will have randomly changed parameter values in the WebAssign version of a given textbook exercise. Note that the 25% weight in no way reflects the importance of doing homework in this course. Doing the homework regularly is essential to good performance.

The few Maple assignments will be done together in groups of 2 or 3 or 4 and submitted by email at the end of each of the chapters 5, 6, 7-8, not graded but returned with feedback when necessary.