MAC 3473 SYLLABUS, FALL 2011

MAC 3473 SYLLABUS, FALL 2011 Syllabus
MAC 3473–Section 3205 (Groisser)–Fall 2011
Honors Analytic Geometry and Calculus 2
MTWF 7th period, MAT 116

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Your instructor
Office hours
Textbook
Exams and grading
What if you miss an exam?
Homework
Workload
Attendance policy
Calculator policy
More about exams
More about grading
Student Honor Code
Religious holidays
Accommodations for students with disabilities
Miscellaneous

Professor 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 if you must email me, please read this first:

I will not answer math questions by email.
I will never provide any grade information by email.
I will not answer anonymous email, or email that lacks an informative subject line and your full name. When I look at my inbox, 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 “Can 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: Tentatively Monday and Friday 8th period (3:00-3:50), and Tuesday 4th period (10:40-11:30). 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.

Text: Stewart, Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 6th edition (6e). We will cover chapters 6-8 and 10-11, with some omissions, and not in order. Topics will include:

applications of the integral
techniques of integration
infinite sequences and series
power series
parametric equations
polar coordinates
conic sections (if time permits)

I discourage the use of solutions manuals. To learn mathematics, you need to see a small number of problems worked out, just to see the principles illustrated; you need to do a large number of problems by yourself. The textbook problems that I assign are selected to be doable based on what should be your accumulated store of knowledge and skills, plus the material in the textbook up to that point. In the long run, you will learn more by struggling with a problem unsuccessfully for two hours, than by giving up after a few minutes and looking at someone else’s solution.

Exams and Grading: Your final grade will be determined by the following:

Three midterms (hour exams), each counting 20% of final grade. Tentative dates for the midterms are Sept. 16 (Fri.), Oct. 14 (Fri.), and Nov. 15 (Tues.).
Cumulative final exam, counting 40% of final grade. The final exam will be given on Thursday, December 15, starting at 5:30 p.m., in our usual classroom. Students are expected to arrange their post-semester travel plans accordingly, and should make those plans NOW. If you are unwilling or unable to arrange to be in town the day and time of your exam, you should try to switch to a section of Calculus 2 (honors or otherwise) whose exam-date/time you find more convenient. 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.
Small bonuses (< 3%) may be given for exceptionally good classroom participation. ("Participation" does not simply mean "attendance"; there are no bonuses just for showing up and breathing.)

I reserve the right to adjust the percentages above in individual cases if I feel that circumstances warrant.

See more about grading below for additional information.

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 going to miss an exam due to illness, you should notify me by phone or email before the exam starts (even if it’s just a few minutes before).

Homework: will be assigned daily and is due by the next class, but will not be collected. It is critical that you keep up with the homework daily. Far too much homework will be assigned for you to catch up after a several-day lapse, even if you think from your past experience that you will be able to do this. I cannot stress this strongly enough. Students who do not keep up with the homework frequently receive D’s or worse (or drop the class to avoid receiving such a grade).

The assignments will be posted on the homework web page . The dates more than one day in advance are estimates, and there will be frequent updates. Assignments may also be modified in class according to how far we get on a given day. You are responsible for checking this page frequently, since in addition to updated assignments, other important information such as exam dates will be confirmed on that page. Of course, exam-date changes will also be announced in class well in advance, and more than once.

if you are unaware of a changed exam date because you weren’t in class when it was changed and you didn’t check the homework page for several days, and this causes you to miss an exam or do poorly on it, that grade (0 if you miss the exam) will still be averaged into your final grade according to the percentages above.

On most days I won’t answer homework questions in class; you should see me in office hours for homework questions (and any other questions you didn’t get to ask in class). However, as long as we’re on pace to get through the syllabus, roughly once a week I will devote the entire period to going over homework and answering any other left-over questions. The class day before an exam will always be used for Q&A.

Workload: On average, in order to receive a satisfactory grade (C or C+), students with good preparation for this class should expect to spend eight to twelve hours per week studying and doing homework for this class. This estimate is an average, not a maximum—some students will require more time, some less; some weeks the workload will be heavier, some lighter. Some circumstances that may increase your workload are:

You did not study a similar amount in your previous classes.
You cannot do algebra quickly and accurately without a calculator (this may be the case if you did not do a large number of exercises in your calculus or pre-calculus classes, or have relied heavily on calculators in the past).
You want to get an A.

Attendance policy. Barring valid reasons such as illness, weddings, funerals, family emergencies, and team activities, I expect students to be in class every day and on time, paying attention for all 50 minutes of the period. Coming late to class is disruptive to both your instructor and your classmates.

If another time commitment (e.g. a class the previous period in a distant location) will force you to be late on a regular basis, you should try to switch to another section.

Currently I plan to take attendance but not to factor it into your grade directly. However, students who choose not to regularly attend class (not counting valid reasons such as those mentioned above) should not expect the same consideration in office hours that students with good attendance will receive. Be aware that the University of Florida Attendance Policies contains 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.

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.

Calculator Policy: Calculators are not allowed on exams, and generally should not be used for homework, although occasionally a homework problem may be assigned that requires a calculator.

More about exams. Most exam problems will be similar to homework, but on most exams I try to put at least one problem that you won’t have seen a clone of before. Such problems will involve no new concepts, but may, for example, combine concepts from different parts of the syllabus. I do this to see whether you’ve gone beyond memorizing a bunch of formulas and rules, and have achieved a real understanding of the material—which you’ll need for an A.

I will give you a copy of an old exam a week prior to your exam, as a sample of the type and number of questions I have asked in the past. Do not expect the questions on your exam to be just minor variations of questions on the sample exam,

although this may be the case for a small number of questions.

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 I will consider assigning, except possibly the D-. Be aware that for many requirements at UF, courses that you’ve taken count only if you get a C or higher; a C- will not meet such requirements.

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”. (In the example above, 730 was the cutoff for a B, not a B-. The cutoff for a B- would have been about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down to the cutoff for a C.) Similarly, a C- means that your work was short of satisfactory, so should not count towards any requirement involving courses completed satisfactorily.

Said another way: another professor whose estimation of whether your work was satisfactory is the same as mine, but who regards C- as meaning “the low end of the satisfactory range”, would not assign you a C-; he would assign you a D+.

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. However, for an example of past grade scales, see the grade scale page for the last time I taught Honors Calculus 2 (Fall 2009) and Honors Calculus 3 (Spring 2010). There is no guarantee that this year’s grade cutoffs will be close to those of the past classes; they could be higher or lower. To see a larger sample you’re welcome to look at my grade-scales for classes older taught earlier than the ones above (you can find these easily by navigating from my home page), but 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.

Student Honor Code: Students are expected to abide by the the Honor Code:

We, the members of the University of Florida community, pledge to hold ourselves and our peers to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.

On all work submitted for credit by students at the university, the following pledge is either required or implied: “On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.”

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.

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.
If you miss class the day I return an exam, you’ll have one week to pick up your exam up from my office, after which I may discard your paper (unless you arrange with me a day and time in the near future for you to come and pick it up).
Cell-phone ringers, audible text-message alerts, etc., should be turned off while you are 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. You do not need to know, in the middle of class, that your friend sent you a text message. (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 also avoid other 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.
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.
Do not read, do the crossword puzzle, etc., while you are in class. If you’re too bored to pay attention, do homework.

Last update made by D. Groisser Sun Aug 21 18:51:03 EDT 2011