Various Useful Comments on Lectures Homework and Exams Statistics 371 Fall Semester 2009 Professor Wardrop The perfect is the enemy of the good Voltaire This course is for me a work in progress This will make your life as a student in this class more frustrating than I would like I am sorry about that but see no realistic way to avoid it Taking this course will be a bit like driving across the U S at night The headlights will not illuminate the whole country at once but with luck they illuminate enough to allow the driver to avoid accidents I do not have all of the course materials prepared I will prepare them as the semester progresses My goal is to always have at least two weeks material ready if you want to work ahead Below I will describe the key components of the course materials 1 I will post Course Notes on my website The Course Notes CN will provide a development of the material covered in Stat 371 In many cases the CN will present much more sophisticated math than you will need to be successful in the course I expect you to read the CN before lecture I will announce and post the sections to be read before each lecture 2 At lecture I will assume that you have read and attempted to understand the assigned material in the CN This is a new feature to my course this semester I don t know how well this will work If the class is honestly having trouble understanding some complicated ideas in the CN then I will spend lecture time on it If however the class is simply blowing off the reading assignment I will not be helpful Distinguishing between these situations will be a challenge for me but not I predict insurmountable After all I have been teaching intro stats for 35 years and have some idea on the difficulty of the material In lecture I will focus mostly on showing you how to use the material presented in the CN I will do this by spending most of the lecture time working out detailed examples of how to use the material These examples will be posted on my website with a title like Lecture Examples You should bring the Lecture Examples to lecture so that you can follow what I am doing i e I won t be writing the Lecture Examples on the board I suspect that this sounds quite vague I don t believe that further explanation at this time would help When I start doing this in lecture I hope the method will be clear If not we can talk about it 3 There will be 12 weekly Homework Assignments that will be due on Thursdays Some Thursdays obviously Thanksgiving but others too will not have homework due Ideally my Lecture Examples will be similar to homework thus attending lecture should make the homework easier Also you are enrolled in a weekly discussion In discussion the TA will show you how to do the Homework Assignment From my point of view the ideal is that you try to do the homework and then get help at discussion If you don t need help then you can skip discussion that week After each homework is submitted I will email solutions to the homework to the class I will not be emailing or posting solutions to the Lecture Examples If you want to see the solutions to the Lecture Examples you must come to lecture or borrow notes from a friend 1 4 Exams We will have two midterms and a final The dates of the exams are Tuesday October 13 during lecture Thursday November 19 during lecture Thursday December 17 10 05 12 05 for lecture 1 Saturday December 19 2 45 4 45 for lecture 2 The rooms for the exams will be announced and posted when they are known The final will be cumulative but mostly will focus on new material after the material covered on the second midterm The exam questions will be very similar to the Lecture Examples and homework exercises Here are the rules for taking the exams The exams will be closed book You will be allowed the following materials only on the desk in front of you during the exams Your writing instruments your exam paper the one page of formulas provided by me see below and your calculator You may not use a cell phone or similar device as a calculator If you violate these rules or if the proctor sees you using a cell phone or similar device you will be charged with academic misconduct I will provide one page of formulas definitions etc for your use during each exam If time allows I will email this page to the class a few days before the exam and you will be able to make requests for additional information I will accommodate requests that I deem reasonable You should not bring the emailed page to the exam I will hand out the final formula page with the exam A note on cheating on the exams Don t do it If I catch anyone cheating I might choose to pursue it to the full extent through the university s system for handling cheating which could result in an expulsion from school At the cost of extra work to me I use a system that makes successful cheating much more difficult for the student I offer its details now because my goals are to dissuade cheating and reassure honest students Entrapping people is not my goal My system is described below Each exam consists of a number of problems I create three versions of each problem The versions are by my design and in my opinion of equal difficulty and cover exactly the same material concepts They simply have somewhat different numbers in them I mix the different versions of each question in many ways to create 15 or more distinct exams The people sitting around you possibly have no problems in common with you or at most a small number of problems in common Thus if you copy answers from a neighbor chances are you will be writing down numbers that are not on your exam When I find such answers I give them no partial credit Here is a simple example of what I mean Exercise 1 asks you to calculate the area of a rectangle base times height Version 1 has a base of 5 and a height of 12 Version 2 has a base of 7 and a height of 18 If a person with Version 2 writes on his her paper 5 12 60 then the person will receive 0 points for this wrong answer If I find several such borrowed answers on an exam I might choose to pursue charges of academic misconduct against the student 2
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