The experiments will be held in your section meetings. (Sections will meet during the first week of classes.) Your performance in those experiments will count in your grade. Even if you perform poorly in the experiment, just participating counts! Since everybody participates in the classroom experiments, it is important that you show up in class on time. If you come in after the experiments start, you will usually not be allowed to participate.
We encourage you to form "lab partnerships" of
two or three persons from the same discussion section to work on your lab
reports. You can work together and show your work to your lab partners. However, everyone must hand in their own homework.
You will need to purchase 4 No. F1712 scantrons (This is the reddish kind where you fill in bubbles for your name and id number, not the puny little bluish kind where you just write your name.) and bring them with you to scheduled quizzes and exams. You should also bring a #2 soft lead pencil to mark your scantron. The scanner does not read black pen marks at all and is not entirely reliable with blue pen marks. Also, you need to fill in your perm number on your scantron when you take quizzes and exams. When you get your scantron, you should fill that number in the bubbles for id number.
To get you involved in lectures, I will periodically ask you a multiple choice question or two on the material we just covered. To register your response, you will need an iclicker, a battery powered transmitter that can be purchased in the UCEN bookstore.
You can save yourself quite a bit of time in doing your homework
by using a computer spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, which is installed
on all of the university's public-access computers and is widely available
on home computers. If you have never used a spreadsheet before, this is a good time
to learn a skill that you are likely to find useful for many years.
To determine your grade, we first calculate your percentages
in each of the five areas: clicker questions, performance in
experiments, homework, quizzes, and final exam.
Here is how the percentages are calculated for each area:
Clicker Questions : The questions will be straightforward, and the purpose is to get you actively involved in lectures. I'll ask three to six questions each lecture, starting on Monday, April 7. If you register a response with your iclicker, right or wrong, you will get one point. If your answer is correct, you will get one more point. I will add up your points over the course and divided by the total number of points (2 X number of questions). The result in your percentage in this area.
Quizzes: We will have three quizzes during the quarter. I'll drop the lowest score. A perfect score on a quiz is 75, so the maximum score on quizzes is 2x75=150. Your percentage in this area is your highest two scores divided by 150.
Homeworks: There are 8 homeworks and each had a maximum score of 5. We drop the lowest homework grade. Homeworks not turned in on time receive a score of zero. The maximum you could receive on homeworks is therefore 7x5=35. Your percentage in this area is your total on your highest 7 homeworks divided by 35.
Performance in Markets: Your profits in each experiment are converted to winnings. If your profit was below the 20th percentile for your type, your winnings are 5. If your profit is above the 80th percentile for your type, your winnings are 10. If your profit is between the 20th and 80th percentile for your type, your winnings are linearly related to your profit. In particular, your winnings will be 5 +5* (your profit - profit of participant in 20th percentile)/(profit of person in 80th percentile - profit of person in 20th percentile). If you don't attend an experiment, your winnings will be zero for that experiment.The highest winning for each experiment is 10. There are 9 experiments. We drop your lowest winnings, which could be a zero if you didn't participate, and sum the remaining scores. The highest possible total is 80, so your percentage in this area is your total winnings divided by 80.
Final Exam: The final has 150 points, 30 question at 5 points a question. Your percentage is your score divided by 150.
Once we determine your percentages in each area, we multiply those percentages
by the weights for those areas and add. This weighted total determines
your grade for
the course. It is calculated this way:
total %=0.15(clicker question %)+0.10(winnings %)+0.15(homework %)+0.30(quiz %)+0.30(final %)
After the final, you can get this percentage from the score rat. It is called Total Percentage.
We use total percentage to determine your grade according to the following table:
96% - 100%
This is the grade reported in the scores rat at the end of the quarter.