Mathematics 138- 2004
Grading Policy for the Projects and the Course

For the entire course, points will be assigned as follows:
Midterm: 60 points
Final exam: 100 points (but see “placement questions” below)
Problem Sets: 60 points
Term Project: 30 points

The project grade will be based half on your presentation, half on what you hand in. It is not guaranteed that both members of a team will get the same grade, but in past years that has often been the case.
Here are the guidelines for the presentation.

Clarity: 4 points.  
Is it clear what you have done and what results you have obtained?
If you state theorems, is it clear exactly what they say?
If you present proofs or outlines of proofs, can your audience follow them?
Do you speak clearly and make good use of transparencies, handouts, computer programs, and/or the blackboard?

Depth and originality: 3 points
Are you presenting something that extends the course in a new direction?  There are lots of ways to do this.  Your project should not be just another homework problem.  A project that could be extended to an undergraduate thesis would score very high.

Relevance: 3 points
Does your project relate clearly to something that was covered in the course?  Are you answering questions that may already have occurred to your classmates?

Timeliness: 3 points
Does your presentation fit neatly into the 13-15 minutes allotted to it? Leaving time for one question would be nice.  Being cut short by the clock would not.  Practicing your presentation for classmates or roommates would help.

Interest: 2 points
Do you hold the attention of the audience?  Something unexpected but appropriate would be a plus. More-than-polite applause when you have finished would be a good sign.

Notice that you can get top marks for presenting only the highlights of what you have done.  Presenting a detailed computational proof is unlikely to be a good idea.  A picture may be worth a thousand words.

At the last lecture, on May 10, you must provide an official title for your presentation and let me know when you can present it. There is a 3-point bonus for being willing to present your project on May 12 and a 2-point bonus for being willing to present on May 17.  If there are more volunteers for these dates than can be scheduled, everyone gets the bonus anyway.

Now for the written part, which is due at class on May 19:
Originality: 3 points
Did you invent something yourself, rather than reporting on the published work of others?  You can get full marks, though, for taking a difficult but well-known topic and putting it in terms that make sense to the course staff. "Reinventing the wheel" without references can count as original.

Correctness and completeness: 7 points
Are you doing good mathematics?  Do you define your terms?  Are your proofs free of flaws?  If you write software or data files for existing software, is it bug-free?  Do you cover all special cases or at least acknowledge the existence of special cases that you choose not to cover?

Clarity and style 4 points:
Is your written work well organized? Can it be followed on a first reading?  Are your sources well documented?  A few paragraphs accompanied by appendices may be the way to go.

Formatting: 1 point
Does your project look nice?  Did you find a satisfactory way to get mathematical symbols into your text?  Are your diagrams well drawn?  Notice that a project done without the aid of a computer or word processor will lose at most this one point.  If the alternative were to try to do mathematics in Microsoft Word, I would forgo the one point!

If you want to hand out written material to accompany your presentation, take it to the copy center at 77 Dunster St., BY NOON ON THE DAY OF YOUR PRESENTATION, and ask for Russell.  You may need to fill out an order form, but last year there was an open-ended form that I signed for copying student projects, and they just had to add your project to the page count.  Make 30 copies. Limit yourself to eight pages.  Do not hand out extra material that you will not have time even to mention in the vain hope that your classmates will find time to read it.  They are as busy as you are!

I think that the copy center will also make transparencies for you.  

If you have material on a computer, you can either bring your own laptop (safest) or email the files to me.  In the latter case, Zip them first.  Mathematica files tend to get corrupted when sent as email attachments.

Placement test questions:
I have committed myself to invent some online placement tests to help place freshmen accurately into courses above the level of Math 21, either 23, 25, 55, or 100-level courses. Questions that test the content of 21a are easy to write, and ones that test 21b already exist.  Where I need help is in inventing questions that test general math background, cleverness, and comfort with formalism.  These can even be arithmetic questions if they are hard enough.  The best guideline is “what would you ask a freshman who was considering taking a course like Math 25, 122, or 138 next year.”  Questions that sort out 25 and 55 from the other courses would be especially useful to me, since when I took Math 55 most of us in the course were sophomores and had a common background from the long-defunct honors calculus course Math 11.

For each of up to 10 appropriate questions, I will make your final exam count 1 point less. If you do well on the final, this is not worth much, but it is good insurance. Questions do not have to be in multiple-choice format, but they need to be ones that I can convert to multiple-choice. 

Submit your questions to me by email before noon on May 24, the day of the final exam. Don’t worry about formatting; I can take care of that.