There will be three types of graded material in this course:
Homework Problems, Exam Problems, and Lab reports.
They will be weighted as follows:
| Homework Problems | 30%
|
| Exam Problems | 40%
|
| Lab Reports | 30%
|
Grading will be on an absolute scale, rather than comparative or
competitive; i.e. there is no "curve."
Instead, grades will be assigned as follows:
| Average | Letter Grade
|
| > 90 | A
|
| > 80 | B
|
| > 65 | C
|
| > 50 | D
|
Problem sets will be assigned weekly, and
each assignment will
typically
contain several problems of each type.
Homework Problems
Homework Problems
are intended
to give you an opportunity to
practice working with new topics
as they
are introduced.
These will generally be
straightforward
problems where you are given a well defined
situation
and asked to
compute
a quantitative
answer
or show that a particular
result
is correct.
Most of these will be
taken from the
end-of-chapter problems in the textbook.
You may (and in fact are encouraged to)
work together on homework,
but you
should
prepare the work you hand in on your own.
Exam Problems
Exam Problems are intended to test the knowledge you have gained from
reading, lectures, and homework.
While some of them may be similar to Homework Problems,
most will be more realistic and application oriented.
Solutions to these problems will typically
involve
a mixture of
analysis, computation, research, and
design.
Lab Reports
Grading of the Lab reports is discussed in the
Lab Guide
section.
Due Dates
Homework and exam problems should be deposited in
the appropriate box
in Abercrombie A141 before 5 PM on the date specified in the assignment.
Problems turned in after 5 PM on the due date,
but before 5 PM the following Monday,
will be accepted with a 20% penalty.
Problems received
after 5 PM on Monday
will not be accepted.
Lab reports
are due one week after the scheduled date of the lab
and
should be given to
Lisa Welch
in the ECE Department office
(Abercrombie A204).
Lab reports which are late will be penalized 10% per week
or fraction thereof.
Redemption
In computing your grade, the problems in each group
(Homework and Exam) will be ordered by score and only the
upper 90% will be used,
i.e. the lower 10% of each group will be discarded.
Exceptions are
the Lab report for the Design Project
and the Lab notebook evaluation,
which are not elegible for exclusion.
Writing up Problems
Homework and Exam Problems should be submitted separately.
All Homework Problems for a single assignment should be collected
together in a single document.
Exam Problems may be submitted individually or together, but each
problem should begin on a separate page.
Your documents may be word processed or handwritten, whichever you prefer,
as long as they are legible
and gramatically correct.
Note that although this is an Engineering, rather than an English, course,
you will be expected to provide at least a basic narative structure to your answers.
In the case of Homework Problems, this may take the form of an occasional brief
phrase
(e.g. "It follows that")
guiding the way through your reasoning.
Your Exam Problems should have a higher level of organization,
e.g. there should be sentences and the occasional paragraph interspersed among
the equations, numbers, and drawings.