Anticipated due dates for each of the five assignments appear in the following table. The links will appear and become active once the assignment text is ready for release.
| Due date | Link(s) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Jan. 24 | Assignment 1 | |
| 2. | Feb. 7 | Assignment 2 | |
| 3. | Feb. 16 | Assignment 3 | |
| 4. | Thu., Mar. 22 | Assignment 4 | |
| 5. | Thu., Mar. 29 |
Each assignment will have two parts, labelled "exercises" and "problems" respectively. Each part will collectively count for 1/2 of the homework portion of your term grade.
The exercises will treat basic understanding of the material; I anticipate that you will find them fairly straightforward to solve. (This is not the same as receiving full credit: I expect that you're as human as I.) The problems will ask you to go beyond the basics; I hope that you will find them interesting as you use them to develop your understanding of the implications of the course material.
Due to the possibly "busy work" nature of the exercises, you may opt to decline to write out and submit solutions to the exercises, and their weight will then transfer to the exams as explained by the calculation below. Remember, however, that similar questions may appear on the exams, and that practice at attentively considering the questions and clearly writing down the answers may help you get good exam marks in the limited time available. (Submission of solutions, whether full or partial, correct or erroneous, cannot hurt your term grade.)
Exam marks will NOT transfer to the problem portion of the assignment mark.
Your course grade will depend on the following quantities.
| E: | The percentage of available exercise marks obtained. |
| P: | The percentage of available problem marks obtained. |
| M: | The percentage of available midterm-exam marks obtained. |
| F: | The percentage of available final-exam marks obtained. |
Let X = M/3+2F/3 be the weighted average of the exams. The term grade will be calculated as
(Thanks to John Watrous for writing the text on which this is based, for the W '10 offering of the course. But please don't bother him regarding this term; for any questions or concerns, contact Prof. Buss.)
Collaborations with classmates should be true collaborations, not just one person helping another along or people trading solutions to problems. I strongly encourage you to try and answer the questions on your own first, because you will not have help from your classmates on the exams.
If you choose to work together on the assignments, you must clearly indicate on your assignment with whom you worked for each problem. If you submit homework solutions without indicating that you worked with someone else, that constitutes a claim that you did it entirely by yourself.
Copying someone else's solution is very different from working with someone to find a solution. Directly copying someone else's solution is plagiarism. This includes making small changes intended to make the solutions look different. (A citation may avoid actual plagiarism, but it may still leave you in violation of copyright, and it certainly doesn't make the solution your own.)
As an analogy, consider the writing of an exam. Before the exam, you acquired knowledge and skills in some fashion, likely including help from others. Your mark on the exam, however, depends on what you write out of your own brain. This homework policy has much the same character.
Occasionally you may find a solution to a homework problem in a book, on the web, or from some other source. When this happens, just be honest, give a proper citation for the source, and write the solution using your own words and style of explaining things. You can still receive full credit for a solution that you found in another source, but if you fail to cite the source you are committing plagiarism.
Do not go in search of solutions—the point of the homework problems is to help you to learn the material, which generally happens most when you are working on problems.
Effective communication is just as important as having the right solution. If your solutions are unclear for whatever reason, including bad handwriting and poor English, the TA is free to penalize you for this. If your handwriting is so bad that the TA cannot read your solution, you should typeset the solutions instead.
If you have difficulty expressing yourself clearly in English, the University's English Language Proficiency Program is available to help you. If you have difficulty with the physical process of writing—either temporary or permanent—contact the Office for Persons with Disabilities.