11/11 Needed Changes to Schedule and Syllabus As you probably know, ASU has cancelled exam week, and has mandated that any final exams be given during the week after Thanksgiving. As a result, changes to our posted Schedule and Syllabus are now required. Here is a summary of those needed changes. Thanks, GBA. 1. In our original schedule, we had a day Held in Reserve (WED 12/02). We will now have an Exam on this day (I will call it a "Review Exam"); however, this is a 75-minute period, while our original exam period was 110 minutes. Our original exam was 30 answer blanks distributed among 15 questions. This Review Exam will be 19 answer blanks distributed among 10 questions. The original exam was worth 40 points; the Review Exam is worth 26 points (some of the blanks in each exam are assigned 2 points credit instead of 1 point). The Review Exam will cover topics 1-17, i.e. the topics for Tests 1-4, with Torque added. 2. Since the Review Exam is 2/3 as long as the original exam, and covers 2/3's of the topics, it should be worth 2/3's as much credit in the final computation of Overall Grades. The original exam was to be worth 18% of your overall grade. The review exam will be worth 12% of your overall grade. The other 6% will be distributed into the daily grade part of the course. Here are the new weightings, with the 6% from the final redistributed: Learning Catalytics and other Classwork: 8% Reading Quizzes: 8% Homework (total points out of 1685): 12% Quizzes (drop 2): 16% WebAssign Tests (drop 2): 44% Final Examination: 12% (CW was originally 6%, RQ was originally 6%, and HW was originally 10%. The increased weighting there is required due to the reduction in Exam weighting, and it should also encourage you to continue doing the reading, answering the RQ questions -- please submit a free response question for each RQ --, coming to class and answering the LC questions there, and working diligently on the MP HW's. More changes to this set of weightings are to be made below.) 3. Test performance on the two recent tests has been below expectations. To incentivize working hard leading up to Test 5, the Review Exam, and Test 6, the number of tries for each answer blank on the tests will be increased from 3 to 6 (but be careful not to spend too much time on any one question). Also, the penalty for an incorrect answer submission will be reduced from 33% to 10%; so, if you get the right answer on the 6th try, you will still get 50% credit for the question. For Test 5 and Test 6, I would recommend quickly skimming through the questions and then beginning your work on those questions for which your confidence is highest. 4. As a further incentive, your score on the Review Exam, if it is higher than your average on Tests 1-4 with 2 drops included (see our Test Average page), will REPLACE your average on Tests 1-4. If this occurs for you, then you will not be able to drop either Test 5 or Test 6; both of those scores will be included in your Test average for the class. If this does not occur for you, then your Test average will still be the average of the best 4 of your 6 tests. 5. In this Fall 2020 semester, it seems that the Quiz scores are a better representation of student understanding than are the Test scores. When partial credit has been available (as on the Quizzes) the averages are reasonable, but when the correct answer is required (as on the Tests) the averages have been too low. As a result, we will switch the weighting of the Quiz and Test categories for Fall 20. So the final weightings for Fall 20 are now: Learning Catalytics and other Classwork: 8% Reading Quizzes: 8% Homework (total points out of 1685): 12% Quizzes (drop 2): 44% WebAssign Tests (drop 2): 16% Review Examination: 12% You can see the Overall averages as figured with these weightings in the Grades section of our class webpage. Remember, by getting a good score on the Review Exam, you can replace your Test average for the first 4 Tests (see item 4 above). It has surely been a stressfull semester for everyone. Please keep up the hard work (do the reading, answer the RQ questions, submit a free response question for each RQ, come to class and answer the LC questions, and work diligently on the MP HW's) for the rest of the semester. Try to do well on Quiz 6, Test 5, the Review Exam, and Test 6. Thanks everyone, and please take care. GBA 8/10 No Updates Yet