(Last Modified: 04 November 2010 06:11:43 PM )
BOOKMARKS
GRADING BREAKDOWN (updated on 17 Feb 03)
10% Homework (reduced from 25%)
20% EXAM #1 (increased from 15%)
20% EXAM #2 (increased from 15%)
20% EXAM #3 (increased from 15%)
15% Projects (5% each)
10% Quizzes
5% Final Project Presentation
Homework will be normally be assigned on Thursday of every week and will be due the following Thursday in class. The Homework Grading Policy is described in more detail below.
Quizzes will normally be given at the beginning of class on Tuesday. The primary purpose for the quiz is to strongly encourage you to keep up with the course and not put studying and working on the homework off until the night before it is due. Questions for the quizzes may come from the review sheets, from the homework, from the lectures, from the assigned reading, or from the exams. Topics that are fair game include all material already covered previously in the course, all homework assignments including the current one, plus the assigned reading material up through and including the day of the quiz. Frequently, quizzes will include questions that people are struggling with. The purpose here is to encourage you to overcome weaknesses in your understanding that are revealed by prior homework and exams so that you learn the material in question and are prepared when you see it again on a later exam. Bear in mind that this means that if you did poorly on one of these topics and choose not to put in the effort to correct the deficiency, then you run a very real risk of losing points twice for the same shortcoming. Don't let this happen to you. In addition, many quizzes will have a question related to the design project. These questions are intended to provide some subtle guidance about ideas you might explore and/or issues you might need to deal with in your project.
Prior to each exam, a Review Sheet will be posted on the Web Site. It is guaranteed that at least one-fourth of the points on the exam will be taken from the review sheet (or textbook problems cited on the Review Sheet) verbatim. Additional exam problems are likely to be slight modifications to Review Sheet problems.
Basic philosophy: You learn to design and analyze circuits by designing and analyzing circuits. There aren't any shortcuts.
Homework is to be turned in no later than the beginning of class on the day it is due.
Like many upper division courses, it is simply not practical to determine your level of competence with regards to the material in this course via three exams and a few quizzes. The homework is crucial both to your learning the material and to our evaluating your mastery of that material. This is why the homework is weighted more heavily than any of Hour Exams. It is also why each homework assignment will contain one or more review problems from material you should already be comfortable with..
You are expected to find a way to turn your assignments in on time (have a classmate turn them in or turn them in to the department secretary). Of course, you always have the option of not turning it in and accepting a zero on the assignment - if this happens once or twice it is not likely to affect your grade.
Late homework will not be accepted. Period. Having said that, if there are truly unusual and compelling circumstances then come and talk to me. In the few, rare, unlikely to occur occasions that homework is accepted late it will be at a considerable penalty of no less than 25%.
The Proper Care and Feeding of Homework Graders:
Your homework is going to be graded by a Homework Grader. It is their job to evaluate what you have presented - not try to figure out what you meant to present. They are your customer - in a very real sense. They are going to pay you with a grade based on the quality of the product you deliver to them. That's how it works in the "real world." If it is readable, complete and correct, you will get paid handsomely. If it is poorly organized, sloppy and difficult to follow, you will not get paid nearly as much - even if the final result is equally correct. If you don't deliver, you don't get paid. Likewise, if your final result is not correct, but your work is well presented, you will get paid for those portions you did deliver (a.k.a., partial credit). Again, believe it or not, that's the way it is in the real world - your customer is the one that ultimately decides how much value your product has and it is not all or nothing in most cases.
Consider a customer that approaches a company to develop a laptop-based GPS navigation system for cars. If the company delivers a solution that works, but it is a black box (no documentation or description of the internal workings) and requires that the user reinstall the operating system every time the street database is updated, then that system is likely to have very little value. On the other hand, another company might have encountered hurdles that it couldn't overcome and delivered nothing more than a bunch of hardware and software modules for various portions of the project. If those modules are well documented such that the customer can take them to another company having the expertise to bring them all together, they may well be willing to pay the majority of the original contract price to the first company in order to get those modules - because even though they didn't get a "correct answer", what they did was on the right track and well presented and therefore has significant value.
Bottom line: Be kind to your grader. Make their life easy. Make it easy to follow your work, particularly your line of reasoning and your approach. Make it easy to see what you are doing and why. Write explanatory comments where appropriate - even a one or two word phrase can really help a reader see why a particular step was taken.
First off, there is no homework grader for this course this semester, so I will be doing the grading. Because of the quantity of homework that must be graded, and because of a desire to provide useful feedback, the grading will be rather holistic, for lack of a better word. I will be going through your work looking at the overall content and will make comments here and there throughout your work, in particular trying to point out where things were overlooked or where principles were misapplied. There is no way to do this everywhere and certainly most errors will go without comment. The goal is to point out several things for you to consider and hopefully your understanding and performance as a whole will improve as you do so. As previously stated, your use of units will be particularly noted and penalized.
The final grade that is assigned will be based on my overall impression of the quantity and quality of the effort presented with most of the emphasis on process - how you approached the problems - and little emphasis on getting "the correct answer". But keep in mind that if you don't get the correct answer, something is wrong with your process - but what I am concerned about is whether your process is mostly reasonable with occasional flaws or if you appear to be totally lost.
The bulk of your grade is based upon the apparent effort and completeness of your work coupled with how well it is presented. If I have to struggle to follow your work, it is not well presented. This is admittedly a highly subjective means of grading - welcome to the real world. As the semester progresses the points lost for not presenting your work well will increase, so take the opportunity to look at how the Instructor's Solutions are presented and learn from the comments made on the work returned to you. Re-read the section on making your grader happy and you will see the benefit to you of presenting your work along the same lines that I do in my solutions. You are cautioned that just because you didn't lose points on a problem - or that no comments were made - doesn't mean that you did the problem correctly. The Instructor's Solutions are on reserve in the library and you are encouraged to check them out to determine the correctness of your work.
The grading in this course will be heavily based on partial credit. The bulk of the points will be associated with demonstrating that you understand the underlying concepts and that you can apply those concepts in a rational manner to solve engineering problems. In general, demonstrating sound problem solving skills is more important than actually solving the problem. If you can identify the essence of a problem and explain it well then you are likely to receive the bulk of the credit even if you are unable to solve the problem. For instance, in a particular circuit analysis you might be able to determine that the voltage on a particular node is the key to solving the problem and be able to show the relationship between that voltage and the desired result, but not be able to figure out how to actually compute the voltage on that node.
In general, all of your solutions on all elements of the course (homework, exams, etc) are expected to be fully supported by your work. Particularly important are items such as circuit diagrams showing the relationships and polarities of all variables and parameters used. Another key element is your set-up. Establish the relationships that embody the essence of the problem and make sure those are clearly identifiable.
Most of the quantities in this course, such as resistance, voltage, current, and transconductance, have units associated with them. These units embody considerable information and you need to be able to use that information to ensure the quality of your work. Everyone makes mistakes when working these types of problems - everyone. But the vast majority of mistakes you will make adversely affect the units - the units simply won't work out and if the units do not work out, then you know the answer is wrong. This is a good thing.
You are expected to use units and track them throughout your work - not simply tack them on at the end based on the units that the answer should have. Failure to do so will result in the loss of points - you cannot and will not receive full credit for a problem in which you failed to properly track your units. The amount of points lost will be dependent on a few things - if it is a minor slip then you will lose points at a level similar to minor math errors. But if your lack of units kept you from identifying an incorrect answer, then you will be penalized about 25% of the points of the problem above and beyond any other points lost. If your failure to use units encouraged the error, such as adding 3.0 and 0.5 and getting 3.5 even though 3.0 was in milliamps and 0.5 was in amps, then you will take a penalty of no less than 50% of the problem's worth above and beyond any other points lost.
This may sound extreme, but consider two things: (1) If you do not track the units throughout the problem, then you squander the opportunity to identify that the answer was wrong and in engineering such failures to identify incorrect results can have catastrophic consequences. Doctors kill people one at a time - engineers do it in job lots. (2) There is absolutely no reason for anyone to lose a single point throughout the semester for failing to track their units. Simply get in the habit of doing it consistently and religiously - in ALL of your work: on the job, at school, and at home - and you will be surprised how much better your results will be.
It will frequently be the case that you will know the answer to the problem before you even begin. The problem might be of the "show that" variety or the answer might be in the back of the book. There is a natural tendency to get the expected answer no matter what it takes. Don't do this. It is not only dishonest and unethical, it is absolutely anathema to the scientific and engineering community and will not be tolerated. Resist this temptation at all costs because if your answer is not supported by your work, you will not only receive no credit for the problem, but may actually receive a negative score. This does not mean that "working backward" from a known or desired answer is not allowed - it is perfectly acceptable and a valuable means of gaining insight into how to solve future problems where you don't have the expected answer available. But the work you submit should be an honest reflection of your attempts to solve the problem. Do not claim to have solved a problem that you haven't.
I had hoped that a section on this would not be necessary - and for the bulk of the students in the class I think this is the case. But it does appear that I need to make my stance on this subject clear.
Working together on the homework is allowed but you have to understand the difference between working together and cheating. Working together means that you both work towards the solution while discussing the issues, explaining what you think should be done next, and agreeing on an approach. It is a HIGHLY valuable learning method. Working together does NOT mean that you do problem A and the other person does problem B and then you trade and copy the other's work. This is called "spiking". Doing this without any attempt to learn or follow the work being copied is called "cold spiking". Both are unacceptable.
A couple of people went beyond working together to solve a homework problem and pretty blatantly copied someone else's work. This is academic dishonesty and my tolerance level for it simply does not exist. If you turn in work, you had better be able to explain what you did or reproduce it - at least to a sufficient degree to convince me that you actually did the work you turned in - if asked to. It's fine to work together on a problem that you don't understand, but what you turn in had better reflect YOUR understanding of that problem at the end of the day. The simplest way to do this is, after working together, take out a new sheet of paper and work the problem from scratch without assistance or looking at someone else's work.
The first time that I determine you have cheated in this way you will take a zero on the assignment - be it homework, quiz, design project, or exam. A second occurrence will result in a failing grade in the course and a referral to the Department Chair for further action at his discretion.