Syllabus and Course Information

MAA 4211 — Advanced Calculus 1
Section 16G0, Fall 2013
MWF 7th period, LIT 205

Link to class home page

Instructor: Dr. David Groisser
Office: Little 308 (southeastern quadrant of building)
Phone: 392-0281 ext. 261
Email: groisser@ufl.edu.
I receive a ton of email, so please read this before emailing me:

  • I won’t answer math questions by email.

  • I will never provideany grade information by email.
  • I won’t answer anonymous email, or email that lacks an
    informative subject line and your full name.

    In the “Sender” field I should see something like “John
    Jones”, or “jj@ufl.edu (John Jones)”, or “johnjones@ufl.edu”; I should
    not see “jj@ufl.edu” or “gr8g8r@hotmail.com”. In the “Subject”
    field I should see something like “May I make an appointment with
    you?”, not “Help! Urgent!” Otherwise, your email will look like
    spam, and I’m likely to delete it unread.

  • For reasons of time and safety, I delete, without reading
    completely, any email that requires me to open an attachment whose
    nature or purpose I cannot easily determine without opening.


Office Hours:
Monday and Friday 8th period (3:00-3:50), and Wednesday 5th period
(11:45-12:35). Please come early in the period or let me know to
expect you later; otherwise I may not stay in my office for the whole
period. See my schedule for updates.
Students who can’t make scheduled office hours may see me by
appointment on most weekdays (but never on a Thursday).

If you have the flu or similar contagious disease, or think you
might, please do not come to my office.


Textbook:
Maxwell Rosenlicht, Introduction to Analysis.


Syllabus (course content):
Chapters 1–5 of Rosenlicht, but I may not stick
religiously to the presentation in the text. General topics will
include:

  • basic concepts of sets and functions (just a quick review, since
    you should have this in prerequisite courses)

  • the real number system
  • metric spaces
  • continuous functions on metric spaces
  • differentiation of real-valued functions of a real variable


Goals:

  • For the student to master the course-content.
  • For the student to become accustomed to communicating mathematical
    ideas precisely and clearly, in written form.



Tentative, approximate weekly schedule of lectures:
Click here. Students are expected
to read the relevant material in the appropriate chapter-section of
the textbook no later than the day after we cover that material in
class, and preferably earlier.


Exams: There will be two midterm
exams and a cumulative final exam. I have not yet decided whether
these will be in-class or take-home exams; there may be some of each
type. I probably will not make this decision until I know how many
students will be in this class. I prefer take-home exams for a class
at this level, and have never given an in-class exam in Advanced
Calculus before, but security and the grading of
take-home exams are difficult when there are more than about 12
to 15 students. I may try to arrange for two-hour non-take-home
midterms a three-hour non-take-home final (“in class” exams, but not
literally). If I do give you take-home exams, I will probably give
you 48 hours for a midterm and either 48 or 72 hours for the final.

My rough estimates for the dates of the midterms are
Wednesday, Oct. 2 and Monday, Nov. 4. These dates are subject to
change. The actual dates will depend strongly on our rate of
progress. I will give you at least a week’s notice before any exam.

If we have a non-take-home final, it
will start at the day and time assigned us by the Registrar (Thurs.,
Dec. 12, 12:30 p.m.). If we have a take-home final, I
may allow different students to pick up and return their exams at
different times, to work around their other exams as best possible,
but no one will be allowed to start a take-home final before the
official start of UF’s final exam period (Sat. Dec. 7, 7:30 a.m.) or
to hand it in after Thurs., Dec. 12, 2:30 p.m.

Note: By registering for this section of this class, you
are agreeing to be available for a non-take-home final exam on
Thurs., Dec. 12, from 12:30 – 2:30 p.m. You are expected to arrange
your post-semester travel plans accordingly, and should make those
plans NOW. I will have little sympathy for students who claim
they are “unable” to take the final exam at its scheduled time, or
that to do so would pose a hardship. If you put yourself in this
position, expect a zero for your final-exam grade.



Homework: There will be regular homework assignments. A
subset of the exercises will be collected at intervals of one to
two weeks. Do the homework when I assign it; if you procrastinate
until the due-date is announced, you won’t finish the homework in
time. To help motivate you to do all the assigned problems, I will not
announce which ones I am collecting until shortly before they are due.

The length and frequency of assignments will vary. Please see
the homework page for rules concerning
homework. This homework page is also where assignments will be posted,
so you are responsible for checking it frequently.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of doing the
homework. The last time I taught MAA 4211,

  • no student who turned in every homework assignment received a course-grade
    lower than C,

  • every student who a grade lower than C for the course had failed to
    hand in at least two homeworks,

  • no student received a grade higher than C+ for the course
    without handing in all the assignments, and

  • on the usual “A=4.0, B=3.0, …” scale, the average course-grade
    of students who handed in all the assignments was 3.1, while the
    average course-grade for the entire class was 2.3.



Grading: The system I use in this class is based on the premise
that some people put their best foot forward on homework and some do
it on exams. It works as follows:


  1. After each homework or exam, I decide a grade scale for that item
    according to the philosophy “A = excellent, B = good, C =
    satisfactory, D = unsatisfactory but passing”. In setting these
    scales, I don’t have a predetermined grade curve or predetermined
    percentages for letter grades.

  2. At the end of the semester, I compute a numerical “raw score”
    for each student according to three different weighting schemes:


    • 20% each midterm
      (total 40%), 20% final, 40% homework;

    • 20% each midterm (total 40%), 40% final, 20%
      homework;

    • 15% each midterm (total 30%), 30% final, 40%
      homework.

  3. By applying the same weighting schemes to the cutoffs for exams
    and homework, I construct three different sets of raw-score grade
    cutoffs. The homework assignments do not all count equally;
    longer assignments count more than shorter assignments.

  4. Using these data, I obtain three letter grades for each
    student. The final grade I assign is the highest of these three.

    I think that the weighting schemes above are varied enough to
    allow every student a reasonable chance to show me his or her best
    work, while at the same time not allowing anyone to completely throw
    away low scores that do, in fact, tell me something. If anyone has
    another reasonable weighting scheme he or she thinks should be on the
    list above, I’ll consider it, provided it is presented to me early
    enough. If at the end of the semester, none of the above schemes is
    giving you the grade you want, that will not be a good enough reason
    for me to consider another scheme in which your best component is
    given inordinately high weight, and your worst component inordinately
    low weight.

More about grading.
The grades that UF currently allows instructors to assign
are A, A–, B+, B, B–, C+, C, C–, D+, D, D–,
and E. (For grade-point equivalencies of these grades, see this
catalog page.) All of these are grades are possible in this class,
except possibly the D–.

In my approach to assigning minus-grades (the same as the approach
used by my professors when I was in college), a B–, for example,
is not the lower end of the B-range; it is
slightly but strictly below the bottom of the B-range, and
means that your work falls a little short of “good”. (Said another
way: another professor whose estimation of whether your work was
satisfactory is the same as mine, but who regards B– as meaning
“the low end of the `good’ range”, would not assign you a
B–; he/she would assign you a C+.) This philosophy of what
minus-grades mean is consistent with the degree-requirements for most
majors at UF: courses that you’ve taken count only if you get a “flat”
C or higher because a C– means that your performance was
less than satisfactory—not that it was barely
satisfactory—and therefore that you did not satisfactorily
complete the course. This philosophy is also consistent with UF’s
S-U
grade option.

For similar reasons, I have never given the D– grade. “D”
means “unsatisfactory but passing”. I have always considered the
next step down to be failing, which at UF is the E grade.

Since I don’t determine the exam-grade cutoffs ahead of time, I
can’t tell you in advance exactly how many points you’ll need to get a
particular grade for the course. For examples of past grade
scales, see the grade-scale pages for the last time I
taught Advanced Calculus 1
(Fall 2001) and Advanced Calculus 2 (Spring 2009).
However, there is no guarantee that this semester’s grade cutoffs
will be close to those of the past classes; they could be higher
or lower. Also, be aware that prior to
Summer 2009 UF had a bizarre “plus-grades but no minus-grades” system
that forced me to decide whether to assign, for example, a C+ or a B
to someone who I thought deserved a B–, in which case I rounded
up to a B. So the cutoffs that you see in my past classes for A, B,
and C are approximately where I’d have set the cutoffs for A–,
B–, and C– had these grades been assignable at the time,
which would have made my class GPA’s a little lower.


What if you miss an exam?
If you miss an exam for a valid reason, I will work out something with
you that is as fair as is feasible. I almost never give make-up exams,
because except in very large classes (which I don’t teach) with
cookie-cutter exams (which I don’t give), there is no such thing as a
fair make-up exam. To create a make-up exam that’s not extremely
unfair, either to the student taking it or his/her classmates, usually
takes me at least six hours. Therefore, rather than a make-up exam,
usually I will just give you a “bye” and simply re-adjust the weights
of the other components of your grade.

If you are too ill to take an exam, you should notify me by phone
or email before the exam starts, even if it’s just a few minutes
before.

Attendance policy.
Students are expected to attend every lecture, barring such things as
illness, weddings, funerals, family emergencies, team activities, and
religious holidays of which I am informed in advance. Students
who choose (for other reasons) not to attend class regularly
are forfeiting the right to my help in office hours, including
explanations of their mistakes on homework and exams. Also be
aware that the
University of Florida Attendance Policies contain the following
paragraph:

The university recognizes the right of the
individual professor to make attendance mandatory. After due warning,
professors may prohibit further attendance and subsequently assign a
failing grade for excessive absences.

I expect students to arrive on time and to pay attention
for all 50 minutes of the period. Coming late to class is disruptive
to both your instructor and your classmates. If a non-optional
time commitment (e.g. a class the previous period in a distant
location) will force you to be late on a regular basis, let me know at
the start of the semester.

Students with a contagious illness are asked to exercise good
judgment and to be considerate of their classmates and instructor
when deciding whether to come to class. Coughing and
sneezing in an enclosed space like a classroom or office is a
wonderful way to spread germs.


Student Honor Code: UF students
are bound by The Honor Pledge, which states,

We, the members of the University of Florida community, pledge to hold
ourselves and our peers to the highest standards of honor and
integrity by abiding by the Honor Code. On all work submitted for
credit by students at the University of Florida, the following pledge
is either required or implied: “On my honor, I have neither given nor
received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.”

The Honor Code (here) specifies a number of behaviors that are in violation of this code,
and the possible sanctions. Furthermore, students are obligated to
report to appropriate personnel any condition that facilitates
academic misconduct. If you have any questions or concerns about
student conduct, please consult your instructor.


Religious Holidays: The following
is part of the
University of Florida Policy on Religious Holidays. “Students,
upon prior notification of their instructors, shall be excused
from class or other scheduled academic activity to observe a religious
holy day of their faith.”


Accommodations for students with disabilities:
Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with
the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide
documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation
to the instructor when requesting accommodation.


Teaching-evaluations:
Students are expected to provide feedback on the quality of
instruction in this course based on 10 criteria. These evaluations are
conducted online at https://evaluations.ufl.edu. Evaluations are
typically open during the last two or three
weeks of the semester, but students will be given specific times when
they are open. Summary results of these assessments are available to
students at https://evaluations.ufl.edu/results.


Miscellaneous:

  • Unless I say otherwise, you are responsible for knowing any material I cover in
    class, any subject covered in homework, and all the material in the
    textbook chapters we are studying. You are also responsible for most
    of MAS 4105 and the Calculus 1-2-3 sequence (MAC 2311-12-13 or the
    equivalent). However, remember you should not base any proofs in this
    class on theorems that were stated but not proved in the lower-level
    calculus sequence (unless we have previously proved these theorems in
    MAA 4211).

  • Do not use your personal computer in class. Ditto for your
    cellphone, except to receive emergency alerts from UF. In particular,
    do not read or write text-messages in class. You may leave your phones
    in “vibrate” mode so that if UF sends an Emergency Alert, you will
    receive it. Note that in this case everybody’s phone will be
    vibrating at the same time, so it will be obvious that something
    significant is happening. If your phone starts vibrating and
    nobody else’s does, please ignore it. Cell-phone ringers, audible
    text-message alerts, etc., should be turned off while you are in
    class. (If you ever need me to make an exception to this rule,
    e.g. if you have a seriously ill family member, let me know before
    class starts.)

  • Please avoid disruptive or distracting noises, such as the tapping
    of pencils or feet, or the zipping and unzipping of backpacks several
    minutes before the end of class.

Last update made by D. Groisser Mon Aug 5 18:42:05 EDT 2013