Course Syllabus for MATH 182 - Fall 2008
Calculus II 182 (4 credit hours)
Call Number: 47165
Description: Topics include further applications and techniques of integration with applications, polynomial approximations, sequences, and series. Prerequisite: Math 181 with a grade of C or better; or a satisfactory ACT/SAT/Placement Test Score.
Instructor: Gary Cohen
Where and when
this course meets: Building C on
the
Office location and hours: My office is Located on the West Charleston Campus in Building H, first floor, room H101. Tel: 651-5812
Office hours this semester will be announced in class.
Please note that in general, I will not be able to schedule other office hours. Therefore please recognize that you will have to adjust your schedule on the days you wish to come see me during my office hours. If you plan on coming to the evening office hours in room C276, please inform me that you will be coming that same day by phone or in person.
Email: gary.cohen@csn.edu
My faculty web-site is
http://www.nevada.edu/~coheng
You are required to go to my website, print out a hard
copy of the entire syllabus and bring it to me, so I can see you have it, and
so I can check off in my grade book that you have received the syllabus. You will be issued a grade of F for the
course, if you have failed to do this before the first exam is given. You cannot be in this course if you have not
read all the policies, procedures and expectations.
TEXTBOOK :
The course and tests are based on my lectures and homework packets. Both lecture and homework problems are based, in large part, on the presentation of material that can be found in Calculus, the 8th edition, by Larson and Hostetler, published by Houghton Mifflin. While it is not required that you purchase the textbook, I would strongly recommend that you purchase the book and student solution manual for the book. My experience in the past has been that the best students in the class who take good lecture notes often do not make much use of the recommended textbook, while other students find a much stronger need for a text to fall back on and become quite frustrated if they do not have one. The material contained in the 7th edition of the textbook is essentially the same, but if you use this edition (or any other besides the 8th) then you are responsible for figuring out what the relevant pages and problems are yourself.
PREREQUISITES: Math 181 or equivalent. A strong calculus I background is required. If you have taken this course at another institution or have taken it a while ago and are in need of review, then it's the student’s responsibility to come to this course with the proper background. This is a fast-paced - intensive course and we will not be able to spend much time on review. The student is expected to function with a decent degree of mathematical maturity and independence in the learning process, without “hand holding. You do not need to remember every topic from math 181 off the top of your head, but you should have learned calculus I well enough that recalling any given part of it in the course of learning is not an issue. So for example, it will do no good to take the attitude “I don’t know double angle formulas because my pre-calc teacher didn’t cover it”. Instead your attitude needs to be more along the lines “well, I can’t recall doing that topic, but since its pre-calc material, I know I am perfectly capable of looking up the topic in a pre-calc book and learning whatever it is I don’t already know that is expected of me now in the current course”. In other words, I do not assume you already know everything (who does?), but I do expect a “can-do” attitude when it comes to this sort of thing.
Course Outcomes:
ATTENDANCE and
RELATED ISSUES: Students are expected to attend class
regularly and be punctual. Students who
find themselves in the position of having to miss numerous classes should
withdraw and take the course when regular on-time attendance is possible. This
course was not designed with the occasional attendee in mind. Each lecture covers a heavy dose of material
– the lectures do not always follow the
book (some of the lectures may be on topics not even covered in the textbook),
so attending the lecture is absolutely critical in order to keep up and not
find yourself lost in class.
It is critical to
note that the material tested on exams is based on my lectures and assignments
– missing class and just reading the textbook will usually not be sufficient
preparation for what will be tested. The
textbook is being used largely in this course as a supplement and
reference.
Anyone arriving late for a test/quiz/exam will automatically lose 10 percentage points on that test/quiz/exam. If you arrive late for a test or quiz, you will be asked to wait in the hallway for a minute or two until I am able to come out in the hall and tell you exactly what materials you need to take out, give you scratch paper, give you a chance to ask any questions you have about the testing procedure, etc.
If I am in the process of giving verbal instructions to the class or handing out tests, you will have to wait until I finish that process. You will not be allowed to come in during the middle of this.
This procedure is to minimize disturbance to the rest of
the class and is not a punishment.
Because
this policy will be strictly enforced, please do yourself a favor and arrive a
few minutes early to class, so that you do not take a chance on being counted
late. Please do not argue about whether or not you were late – it will do no
good. Anytime after the test has been
announced as having begun, you are late.
Also, please do not try to engage me in a conversation at this time – the point is to have silence so that
other students will not be disrupted.
GRADING:
There will be 3 exams in the course prior to the final exam and a cumulative final exam. There will also be pop quizzes.
Your final course grade is determined from the following weighting of grades:
Test #1 20%
Test #3 20%
Final Exam 20%
The quizzes may occur at any time during any class and will not always be announced in advanced (hence the word “pop”). The number of quizzes for the course is not pre-determined but will probably be somewhere between 5 and 10.
If you miss one of the first
three exams, then the cumulative final exam automatically will be counted for
40% of your course grade. Missing more
than one of the first three exams will result in an automatic score of zero for
any miss beyond the first miss. An additional stipulation is that if I choose
to give any of the tests as take-home tests, then those tests MUST be done and
may be missed under no circumstances whatever.
Since the final exam will be a cumulative (hence harder) exam, you are strongly advised not to miss the first in-class exam. There are absolutely no make-up tests/quizzes and there is no make-up exam for the final exam. The final exam is mandatory - if you do not show up for the final exam and take it, then your course grade will be “F”. In the event that I decide to make one of the first three exams a take-home exam, then missing any take-home exam would not be an option. The reasoning is that if I give a take-home exam, then I would give at least several days to do it. If I decided to give any of the exams as take-home exams, I will announce it in class at least one class period prior to handing it out.
If you miss a class, it is your responsibility to get a copy of any assignments/handouts that were distributed during the missed class. I may or may not have a copy of what you need with me the next class period – I am not a walking office. Therefore you may need to rely on photocopying the handouts from another student in order to be able to do the work by the required deadline. You will not be given extra time to complete the work, regardless of whether or not I have what you need when you need it. This I view as the student responsibility –not mine. Please do not call or email me asking me to email or fax what you need. Please do not ask me what you missed when you were gone – since the course is lecture driven, you will have to get the notes from another student in the class and see for yourself what you missed.
The basic grading scale for all work in the course will be:
90-100% A
80-89% B
70-79% C
60-69 D
Below 60% F
+/- scores (such as B+ or C-) will be determined within the above broader grade categories when I assign final grades (there is no such grade in the course as A+, however). When calculating grades, rounding up is done only for scores at least halfway between two whole numbers (so 84.5 would be rounded up to 85 but 84.4 would be rounded to 84).
Calculators: You may use scientific or graphing
calculators on quizzes and tests, including the final exam, except in those
cases in which it is specifically announced prior to handing out the test/quiz
that you may not. You are responsible for learning how to use your own calculator - I
will not answer questions regarding how to use your specific calculator during
quizzes/tests/final exam. If you do
not have a graphing calculator and choose to purchase one, I recommend the
TI-85 or TI-86. I am most familiar with
these two models. If you choose to use another type of calculator, I will not be able to
help you in learning to use it, as different models often work in very
different ways.
I DO NOT LEND OUT MY
CALCULATOR TO STUDENTS WHO FORGET TO BRING THEIR
OWN FOR TESTS/FINAL
EXAM. I do not allow students to share a
calculator on tests/exams, so if you want to use one, then be sure to bring
your own. You may also want to bring an
extra set of good batteries just in case the ones in your calculator fail
during the test.
The overall calculator philosophy that shall be adopted for this course can perhaps be summarized by the following points:
1. Calculators are valuable tools that should be used as such to make doing math less tedious. However, their usage in this course should not replace an understanding of the basic mathematical principles taught.
2. I am not interested in spending class time teaching the calculator. Everyone has a different model and they do not always work the same way – especially with regard to some of the more advanced features...therefore, you are responsible for learning how to use your own calculator. In general, for most of the topics, I do not want you to use the fancier calculator features that would give you an answer without showing me the basic steps of the logical reasoning. Even when you use a calculator, you are still responsible for providing me with a coherent and detailed explanation of the logical steps you used in solving a given problem. I will let you know of any exceptions to this as the course progresses.
3. Since calculators/computers can do a lot of calculations fast, sometimes this allows one to explore finding interesting patterns that you may have otherwise not noticed by long tedious hand-calculation...
This is a realistic way in which people sometimes use technology in the research world –it can be fun, challenging and rewarding. However, a calculator should never be used as a crutch or a replacement for an actual understanding of basic mathematical principles.
Help with problems in other
courses: I am teaching you math 181
and therefore will be as helpful as I can with all your math 181
questions. For help with questions in
other math courses that you may be taking elsewhere (such as linear algebra or
differential equations or applied math courses, for instance), please see your
instructor for those courses – I will not be available for helping you with
material I am not teaching you.
Homework:
You are responsible for doing all the required homework after each lecture, regardless of whether or
not I specifically remember to tell you
to do it (just assume you should start working on it immediately, unless you
are told not to). Do not let yourself
get behind in the homework. This is a
fast moving course and you will find it hard to catch up if you put off
assignments until later. The homework is your opportunity to learn from your
mistakes, but your course grade will reflect the end result only - how well you
are able to perform on the final exam/quizzes/tests. If you
do not come to class having done the homework, you will not be able to derive
the full benefit of the homework and may feel lost on material that presumes an
understanding of previously covered topics.
Showing your
work: Always show all work. Sometimes I may give more partial credit than
other times (sometimes I may be generous and other times I may not give much
partial credit – depending on the nature of the topic and the kinds of
quiz/exam questions), but unless it is explicitly stated to the contrary, you are required to show all work in a
well-presented organized manner in order to be eligible to receive credit.
When grading, I
usually go by the principle: “little
work receives little or no credit, regardless of whether the answer is right or
not.” Being able to clearly
show/explain how you arrived at your
answer is something I consider to be an essential part of what a college
educated person is able to do.
I have had many experiences where students have been shocked and upset by not receiving credit for correct answers, but in which there was a gap in logical justification. Just remember, I am grading you on your logical steps – not on the answer (which for all I know, you might have copied off someone else’s paper). The two kinds of mistakes that most bother me are: (a) gaps in logical steps shown in your work,
(b) incorrect usage of mathematical notations, (c) work that is not neatly written or that is disorganized or too abbreviated and hard to follow. Since you only have two take-home tests, I expect each one of them to look as though you put a lot of time and effort into them. This includes presentation/neatness./clarity as well as accuracy.
Extra Credit:
There may be a few
opportunities to do an extra credit assignment to earn a few extra points in
the course. Most of these kinds of
assignments may involve things that are peripheral/tangential to the thrust of
the course and will not be useful for making up for a lack of understanding of
required material. A few of these points may involve viewing a
math-related video in class and do a related assignment on it. I will generally not announce the videos in
advance. There may also be an extra
credit problem or two on some of the tests that you can choose to attempt if
you have time for it after doing the rest of the test. The total extra credit points for the course
will be very few in number. The
occasional extra credit problem on tests will be hard compared to the required
problems, but I may occasionally hint in lecture about possible candidates for
such problems. My suggestion is to take
careful notes in lecture and anticipate the extra credit questions the best you
can, if you care about them – but please do not hound me for hints. The purpose of extra credit test questions is
to demonstrate ingenuity on the test – not to know in advance which problems
you will be asked to answer. In order to have your extra credit work
count, you must have at least a 70% average for your test/quiz average. If you have lower than a 70% test/quiz
average, then extra credit will not change your grade. Much of the extra credit may only be a
“check” in my grade book and the point value will not be decided until I do
final grades. The idea of extra credit
is to be “icing on the cake” and not be a means of converting a poor grade into
a good one.
Withdraw/Incompletes:
Note: If you quit attending and do not officially withdraw by the deadline, you will receive an F. I will not issue grades of W or I on account of poor course performance, so if you need to withdraw, be sure to do it in the proper way – this is a student responsibility, not a teacher responsibility.. Incompletes will be issued only under very unusual circumstances. If it is determined that a student needs to receive an incomplete (incompletes are extremely rare and usually only for verifiable medical emergencies), the student will be required to make up the remaining course work on a schedule agreed upon between student and instructor –I will only give incompletes that can be made up in not more than a couple weeks from the end of the course, despite the fact that the school policy states that instructors may (but are not required to) give more time than this. I will not let a student drag things out for many weeks.
The final exam will be cumulative in nature and will be
based primarily on the totality of all work given in the course (so you would
be very wise to save all returned quizzes/tests in a notebook and make sure you
can do all problems that you missed). THE TESTS/QUIZZES/REQUIRED HOMEWORK ARE
YOUR STUDY GUIDE FOR THE FINAL EXAM - nothing will be a decent substitute for
studying your past quizzes/tests/homework and class notes!!! Additionally, you may be asked some questions
on the final exam that are similar to homework problems that have been assigned
but not yet tested.
ACADEMIC HONESTY: Cheating, plagiarism and other acts of
academic dishonesty are considered to be very serious offenses at CSN. Any student involved in such activity will be
reported to the administration for disciplinary action. Penalties may range from receiving zeros on
quizzes/tests to failing the course to being expelled from the college. You are expected to have read and understood
the current issue of the student handbook regarding student responsibilities
and rights and the intellectual property policy for information about what
constitutes acceptable behavior on campus.
Scholastic dishonesty will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the
fullest extent
CLASSROOM CONDUCT: Any behavior deemed disruptive or counter productive to the educational goals of the class will be grounds for removal of a student from the class. Repetition of such an offense may result in expulsion from the course.
Please be aware that talking to your classmates while I am lecturing is disruptive to other students in the class and to me. Often students do not realize that even chatting in the back of the room can be heard in the first row near the chalkboard. Therefore I urge each student to respect others in the class by saving conversations for appropriate times (before class, after class, during breaks and in class group activities). If I get the impression that there is talking over me while I am lecturing, I may take this as a sign that the class is bored and decide that the time for a pop quiz is ripe. I also reserve the right to ask a disruptive student to sit in another seat of my choice. If a student continues to be disruptive, I may exercise several options such as calling campus police to have the student removed from class as outlined by the School’s disruptive student policy. If this happens, you might not (probably not) be reinstated in the class.
All cell phone usage is banned in the classroom. This includes talking on the phone, listening
to voice mail, reading and sending text messages and using your cell phone as a
calculator or for any other purpose during all tests and quizzes.
Students with medical, psychological, learning or other
disabilities desiring academic adjustments, accommodations or auxiliary aids
will need to contact the campus
The Disability center determines eligibility for and authorizes the provision of services.
Finding out your final course Grade: I do not post grades for reasons of protecting individual privacy of all students - therefore you will need to wait until your grade is available from the school via the automated system. NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS POLICY WILL BE MADE FOR ANY REASON. I DO NOT MAIL INDIVIDUAL GRADES ON POSTCARDS and I do not send them in email or in any other way. It is the student’s responsibility to keep track of all quizzes in order to monitor course progress. I do not carry my gradebook with me so I will not be able to tell you your grade off the top of my head.
Requirements for all take-home work:
Unless otherwise explicitly
specified, all take-home assignments to be handed in for a grade must be done
so as to satisfy the following specifications.
Failure to do so will result in grade penalties.
1. Late work will be assessed a penalty of 15% off per each day late. When establishing a due date for any given take-home assignment, I always allow for more time than I think should be taken for students to complete the assignment – I usually allow for several days past the “reasonable length of time” that I have in my own mind. You are highly encouraged to begin tackling the assignment right away and not procrastinate and are free to hand it in to me any time before or on the announced due date. Therefore, I do not view requests for extensions as reasonable, even under emergency circumstances. If I were going to allow extensions, then I would also have made the initial due date earlier – by going out of my way to allow for more than ample time in the first place, I have in effect already given an automatic “extension” beyond a more “normal” length of time. Therefore, all deadlines are fixed and final.
2. Doing your own work/Cheating. I can not monitor whatever cheating may go
on outside of the
classroom and I will not pretend to be able to do so. However, my experience tells me that people
who cheat by having other people do their work for them and do not learn the
material very well as a result, also are the people who are not able to perform
on the in-class exams. Since most of
your total course grade depends on in-class performance, you have much more to
lose than gain by having other people do your take-home work (since you will
not have any help when taking an in-class exam). Taking the proper amount of time to really
learn the material, make your own mistakes on the take-home work, and correct
those mistakes in your preparation for the exams, is the only way I know to be
able to prepare yourself for the in-class exams. In addition to the take-home quizzes that are
part of your grade, I may also sometimes give out practice quizzes or practice
problems to do at home that will not be part of your grade but that are
intended to help give you additional practice to prepare you better for the
exams. Really taking your time on these
practice opportunities and doing your own work and correcting your own mistakes
is the best way to prepare for the exams.
3. I expect the appearance of the work to look “nearly professional”. By this I do not
mean that it has to be typed – it
can be hand written, but very very neatly with no extraneous marks on the page,
no significant use of white-out on any given page, no cross-outs, etc. I expect the work to look like you took some
time and a lot of care to do it. Of
course math scribbles are never this neat initially – therefore you will need to do your work on scratch paper and then copy
it down NEATLY on the sheets to be handed in, showing all RELEVANT work in a
logical order and using correct math terminology and correct mathematical
notations.
All work should be done on standard 8.5 by 11 inch loose-leaf notebook paper or other paper of the same size (with out without holes). Handing in paper torn from a spiral notebook or any other paper with perforated edges is not acceptable and will receive a point-penalty of up to 20% of the total number of possible points. Handing in ripped/torn paper or otherwise mutilated paper will also receive the same kind of point penalty. My own philosophy on matters of neatness/care is that college is a time for you to demonstrate the BEST WORK of which you are capable. Having part of your grade reflect upon the level of care/pride/neatness is perfectly reasonable, since such issues are ones which matter a great deal in many “real world” professional job situations. Just think of some of your own experiences (I bet everyone has had them) in which you were not able to understand another person’s written description of something only because they did not take enough time and care with expressing the information in a clear way.
4. Do I always have to solve a problem like it was done in class or in the
textbook?
No – in areas of math and science, there is lots of room for uniqueness and creativity and I certainly make no claims to always have the easiest and absolute best way of doing a problem. To make such a claim would be arrogant. However, there are some restrictions of which you need to be aware, in order to preserve the continuity of the course. Here are the ones that come to mind: In order to receive credit for a solution, you must show all work and explain in a logical manner, from beginning to end, how the solution follows from material covered up to that point in the course. If your solution relies on significant theorems not covered in this course (but which another teacher in another course may have told you about), you may not receive credit for the work. The reason for this is simple: What I stress, for the most part, is logical development of material. That means that giving a solution that is reliant on a theorem that was not covered yet, gives you (and maybe a few others who happen to know the same theorem from a class taken elsewhere) an unfair advantage over someone who was never told about such a theorem. To be sure everyone has the same “tools” from which to work, it is a reasonable restriction to require you to use what has been done in this class and not pull in odds and ends from other places.
A similar principle applies to definitions. It is often the case that different textbooks adopt different definitions for the same thing. In such cases, if I am stressing a given definition in class and make a point of saying that is our definition, then that is the one you are expected to use if I ask for the definition. Although I only occasionally ask for definitions on tests/quizzes, I will only accept very precise definitions on those few occasions when I do ask for them. If we have stressed a given definition in class then I would expect to see that exact same definition as an answer on a test/quiz, should I ask for it and not just something you think is “close enough.”
The reason has nothing to do with any belief on my part that my definition is the best one – but rather it has everything to do with the need for the entire class to be united and consistent in the details of how we think about things, so that proofs of theorems (that are ultimately dependent on certain definitions) make sense to everyone in the class for the same reasons (or perhaps everyone is lost – but not on account of misunderstanding the definitions).
After all, just think of how frustrating personal conversations can be if the two people involved are not even using the same working definitions (but are not aware of that fact) and whose basic disagreement comes down in the end analysis to a difference in definitions!
You are expected to attend class regularly
and will be held responsible for all topics and sections covered in class. This
is NOT a course designed with the “occasional attendee” in mind. Coming to class is the way to find out what
the assignments are, what material was covered, what was stressed, what was
omitted, what was presented differently than in the textbook and to ensure that
you are doing what is expected of you. I
will sometimes present material from a different point of view than the book
and I do not feel obligated to follow the book's presentation of material if I
wish to stress different things. This
also means I will not always follow the
section numbers in the book in a strict linear order (so for example I may
combine several sections into one lecture, skipping some kinds of examples and
adding a few of my own that are not in the book at all...or I may take a
totally different approach than what is presented in the book...You really do
not want to miss lecture!).
I am looking forward to helping you do your best in my course and wish you a great semester!!
“If I have seen further
than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants...” -
I believe in honesty and
directness when it comes to communication with students. Therefore, I will tell you outright that
there is far more homework in this class than we could ever hope to have the
time to cover in class. Not only that,
but it gets worse: Since many calculus
problems are rather time consuming, there will really only be time to do a
small fraction of all homework problems in class. This is perhaps a different situation than
you have experienced in previous lower level math courses, where there may have
been fewer or simpler, less time consuming problems. Since this course is a prerequisite for
serious minded students who will mostly be going into math-related majors
(engineering, physics, etc), we simply can not afford to fail to get through
the vast amount of material that will be presumed of you in such majors. Therefore, although the homework is very
important for you to do outside of class, the homework will very often not form
a central part of many lectures – at this point in your studies, a certain
amount of independence and ability to function without being hand-held through
each homework problem you get stuck on is presumed, indeed. A wonderful aid to you will be the student
solution manual sold in the book store.
Buy it and use it as much as needed when doing your homework (although
it's also important to give each problem a serious attempt before just looking
up the solution).
On a positive note, you are
more than welcome to come to office hours and discuss problems on which you get
stuck. Sometimes in class although we
might not have the time to slog through the tedious details of a given problem,
if at all possible, I will try to give useful advice on how to start and in
which direction you should try to head.
This often will be enough for you to go home and carefully work out the
details.
For those of you who have had me as your teacher in previous calculus courses, you probably have a good idea of how much time you will need doing homework. For those of you who have not had me before, all I can tell you is that you should expect to spend a lot of time doing calculus homework. This means being realistic about not overloading yourself with an unreasonable load of classes. Roughly I would estimate that the average student would spend around 4 hours per lecture doing homework – that’s a minimal estimate (2 hours spent on studying lecture notes and 2 hours spent doing the problems...even though a few problems from each section might be challenging and take a long time if you get stuck on those). I would also caution you about trying to do all your calculus homework and studying for the week in just one or two sittings. That’s not a reasonable plan for the average human to absorb this material at the expected level. You should be doing calculus at least 4 or 5 days out of the week, if not more.
The world of calculus is a jungle. Nobody can do all the problems in each section in reasonable time – and few people would have that much time. Additionally, there is a vast range of difficulty levels represented in the problem sections in the text. Some of the more difficult problems are put there to challenge the very best students. You should not feel bad about not being able to do such problems – some of these even are challenging problems for math teachers!
The point here is that this makes calculus a living breathing subject that is not just dead after you have gone through material initially – there is always more to come back to and try again if you couldn’t do some of these problems the first time you studied this material.
However, by doing the carefully selected problems in your homework assignments, you should leave this class with a solid background for further study of this very deep subject and its applications. So sit back and enjoy the ride!
Wishing you a great semester,
Gary Cohen
If
you arrive late to a test (defined by my announcement at the start of the test
that the test has officially begun), you
will lose 10 percentage points on that test. There
are no exceptions to this policy.
You are expected to be in your seats at least 5 minutes before the
official test time.
If
the test is scheduled to begin, say at 6:00 and you arrive at 6:00, then you
are already a disturbance to the students who have begun taking the test, since
you will probably be unpacking and shuffling about. If you arrive late, then come in as quietly
as you can and do not argue with me about whether or not you are late or about
how unfair you think the policy is. By
being a student in my class, you are agreeing to abide by this policy, whether
you agree or disagree with it. If you
can not accept this policy, then do not take the class.
Every student in my class is subject to all policies expressed in this syllabus, whether or not you claim to have received a copy of it. Remember, as noted earlier in the syllabus, you are required to print out the entire syllabus and be checked off in my grade book for having received a copy.
If you feel a grading error has been made on one or more of your test questions, I will be happy to re-grade the entire test for you, but I will not consider individual problems for re-grading. The philosophy is simple: My goal is to ensure you end up receiving the score you earned. If an error in grading has deprived you of a few points, but an error in grading another problem has given you too many points, then both errors ought to be corrected – not only the ones that give you more points. When I hand back tests, I will allow you a short time to look over your test carefully in class and decide whether or not you would like the entire test re-graded and hand it back to me for re-grading immediately at that time before it leaves the room. Once I have given the class this chance to make a decision about re-grading and announce the last chance to hand the test back in for re-grading, I will not consider any further requests for re-grading that test at any time. If you decide you would like your test re-graded, then please follow proper procedure and hand back the test with a note to me on it, which details exactly where you think an error has been made. Each test is graded individually and not by comparison with other students. You may feel that you had more points taken off for making the same mistake as another student, but in reality, your paper may have suffered higher point loss for other reasons (such as degree of incorrectness in use of mathematical notations, clarity of explanation of what exactly your reasoning was, intelligibility, etc.).
Please be aware that often before I hand tests back, I make photocopies of each students’ test or of all tests with scores in a certain pre-decided range. If when re-grading and comparing the test you handed back to me with the photocopy of the original version you handed in, I detect any changes (erasures, crossings-out, re-writing things that were not originally there, etc.), I will promptly assign you an F course grade for cheating. I may also decide to pursue more severe action with the college administration, as I take cheating to be a very serious offense and will not deal with it lightly.
Office hours serve several
purposes. Primarily, office hours are a
time when a student having difficulty with the course can establish and
maintain occasional contact with the professor of the course. While I am happy to talk to my students
during office hours, I would like to
stress that it is not the purpose of office hours to use that time for private
tutoring. If you need that much help
in the course, you will need to find a private tutor. To help you understand what I consider
appropriate and inappropriate use of office hours, consider the examples below:
Appropriate and
inappropriate uses for office hours:
1. Ask the professor
general advice. For instance, “do you
think I have adequate background to do well in this course?”, “Do you think that I have enough study time
available to do well in the course?” “How
do you think I can change the way I study so as to learn better in this
course?”, etc....there are many kinds of advice questions that one may want to
ask.
2. Asking about points from lecture that you did not understand: If you plan to ask me about lecture, then please come prepared to office hours with your lecture notes in hand – do not waste time by being vague and expecting me to know what you are talking about unless you can articulately ask your questions. I realize you might be a bit lost and do not have great comprehension of a given math topic, but nevertheless I do expect you to have specific questions in mind about what you do not understand. Just telling me “I am totally lost and need you to explain everything” will not be very useful. If I have an hour for office hours, then please realize that your personal time with me any given day may be limited to about 15 or 20 minutes –not the whole hour. Therefore, being specific and articulate will be necessary if we are to make any progress in that time.
3. I will not allow any one student to dominate office hours. While I encourage you
to maintain contact with me (all students, but especially those struggling with the course), I do not deem it appropriate for the same student to show up regularly and predictably every office hour. Again, the intended purpose of office hours is occasional contact outside class, but definitely not private tutoring and not directed study. We all need a little bit of help every now and then, but if you are in need of private tutoring, I will not hesitate to tell you so. In college level courses, a certain level of independence in the learning process is presumed
4. Please do not bring some long messy
computation and ask me to “find your mistake”.
If you want to go over a problem that has caused you great difficulty,
then I will often get you started or give you a decent hint or head start or
discussion about some conceptual aspect of the problem that seems to be the
source of difficulty, if I can identify one.
Finding things like nit-picky arithmetic mistakes is your
responsibility, not mine. No matter how
much math you ever learn, you are still human and will occasionally always
still make these kind of mistakes – but it is not a good use of office hours to
have me look at a long detailed calculation in order to hunt down those kind of
mistakes for you – by this point, you are expected to do that kind of hunting
yourself. If you look and look and still
can’t find your arithmetic error, then look some more...chances are that I can
not find it any quicker (and probably I am slower) than you for that sort of
thing. Take a break, listen to some
music, drink a cup of tea and then go back to it a little later – that often
helps.
5. Please come prepared and organized regarding the purpose of your visit during office hours.
I do begin to wonder about how serious the student is who has to first start digging around and flipping through pages of disorganized material desperately trying to figure out where he/she put this or that question....you are supposed to do all that before you come and be prepared with your materials when you show up for office hours. My time is valuable as is yours!
It's
simple. If I catch you cheating or have
strong evidence of cheating on either the in-class or take-home tests, then I
will go out of my way to pursue the most severe action possible with the
administration (which can include, but is not limited to, expulsion from the
course or expulsion from CSN or assignment of a grade of “F” for the course,
notations on transcripts that cheating had been judged to have taken
place). Be forewarned that although I
can not monitor you when you are doing a take-home exam, if I detect certain
consistent and highly unlikely “coincidences” between certain student’s test
papers, you will be called into my office for a required meeting as a first
step in getting to the bottom of these unlikely coincidences”. Be advised that after having graded thousands
upon thousands of student papers over the years, I am very much in touch with
similarities that are the sort that can occur by chance alone as well as other
types of similarities that do not occur by chance, but that are a direct result
of student mutual cooperation in doing a test.
Unless otherwise specified, you
are always expected to do all your own work on your graded assignments and are
not allowed to work together with other students or discuss any aspect of the
test before handing it to me. Asking
other people (tutors, teachers, Internet help chat rooms, bulletin boards,
etc.) is also cheating when it comes to tests.
Plagiarism (either directly
copying or nearly directly copying – i.e., making trivial changes and calling
the work your own) is also cheating in my class.
Disclaimer for entire syllabus:
Suggested Homework problems from the text: Calculus
8th ed. by Larson/Hostetler/Edwards are as follows.
Actually, it's an insanely long list, but that way nobody will complain about
getting bored:
Sec 5.1: 1-69, 77-87,
93-97, 103, 105
Sec 5.2: 1-41, 43., 47-53, 61, 63, 71, 73, 83, 87, 93, 102
Sec 5.3: 1-35, 63-67,
71-81, 83, 89, 95, 101, 103, 107, 109
Sec 5.4: 1-27, 33-69,
85-109
Sec 5.5: 1-29, 37-71,
81-87, 103
Sec 5.6: 3-27. 31-35,
41-59, 61-65, 71, 75, 83, 85, 87, 91
Sec 5.7: 1-43, 53,
63-67
Sec 5.8: Skip
Sec 6.1: 1-47. 49, 57
Sec 6.2: 1-15, 25,
33-37, 41-55, 63, 71-75
Sec 6.3: 1-23, 27-43,
45, 47
Sec 6.4: Skip
Sec 7.1: 1-47, 65, 79,
85
Sec 7.2: 1-35, 47, 49,
55, 61-63
Sec 7.3: 1-29, 41, 43
Sec 7.4: 1-13, 37-43,
53
Sec 7.5: 9-33
Sec 7.6: Skip
Sec 7.7: 1-25
Sec 8.1: 15-49, 57, 59,
69, 73
Sec 8.2: 1-41, 47-57,
59-69
Sec 8.3: 1-45, 51-71,
87, 89, 105, 106
Sec 8.4: 5-53, 67, 71.
87
Sec 8.5: 7-27, 41, 43
Sec 8.6: 1-49, 63-69
Sec 8.7: 11-57, 83.
97, 100
Sec 8.8: 1-49, 53-61,
67, 69, 83, 85, 87
Sec 9.1: 1-93, 121. 123
Sec 9.2: 1-27, 35-71,
99, 109, 117, 121, 125
Sec 9.3: 1-41, 51
Sec 9.4: 3-35
Sec 9.5: 11-39, 47-61,
79, 81, 83
Sec 9.6: 1-63
Sec 9.7: 3-29
Sec 9.8: 1-31
Sec 9.9: 1-15
Sec 9.10:
21-29