HONORS 391A: Seminar: On Numbers and Games

Course Requirements and Grading

Your grade in HONORS 391A will be based on the following:

Attendance and Participation: This is the major component of the course, and your attendance and participation score will be 50% of your grade. Missing more than one of the class sessions without a valid excuse (normally with prior notification to Dave) will result in F's being averaged into this score).
Homework: There will be assignments given in one class, posted on this site, and due in the following class. Typically there will be one problem per week. Your writeup must be your own in presentation, though you may work with others on solving the problem. The homework component will be 25% of the course.
Project/Presentation: Each of you, in pairs, will research a topic of your choice and make a 15-20 minute presentation to me and to the other students in class near the end of the term. This will count 25% of the total grade.
Note:Most of you are Commonwealth College students and used to doing good work and receiving high grades for it. I have my standards for what I consider A work, even in a one-credit seminar, and I will apply them. But I would be happy, and not incredibly surprised, if you all got A's -- there is no "curve" in the sense of you competing against each other.

All work submitted must be your own in presentation. How much outside help is allowed depends on the course component.

For in-class assignments, almost anything goes as a source of information, including the instructor and your classmates, but you must still write up the solution in your own words so direct copying is not allowed.
With homework the situation is in between and the rule harder to specify. You may discuss homework with other students, in fact I encourage this as a learning experience. But again, the writeup must be your work. Copying is not allowed, and collaboration so close that it looks like copying is not allowed. (In general, if I get two identical homeworks I will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and will give you a stern warning that could lead to formal action the next time.) A good practice is to divide your work into an "ideas phase" where you collaborate and a "writeup phase" where you work alone -- enter the writeup phase with notes, but not written solutions.
If you make use of a printed or on-line source for the homework, other than specific course materials such as the textbook or web site, please mention it in your writeup. Of course copying a solution to a problem from the web is cheating, and this is easier for us to detect than you might think.

Last modified 5 September 2013