Changes may be made to this document, and linked pages or files, before the semester starts. Some links may not work until August 20, 2021.

Syllabus and course information

MAA 4211 — Advanced Calculus 1
Section 1216 (26002), Fall 2021
MWF 5th period, Anderson 32

Link to class home page


Syllabus (course content): A rigorous treatment of concepts and tools learned in Calculus 1, Calculus 2, and/or precalculus. We will cover chapters 1–7 of the textbook, with a few omissions and additions. General topics will include:

   Textbook: Stephen Abbott, Understanding Analysis, 2nd edition (2015).

   Tentative, approximate weekly schedule of lectures. Click here. You are expected to read the relevant material in the appropriate chapter-section of the textbook no later than the day after we cover that material in class.

   Goals of course:

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Communicating with Dr. Groisser outside class

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Lecture modality

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COVID-19 precautions

As of this writing, CDC guidance on mask-wearing is: "To maximize protection from the Delta variant and prevent possibly spreading it to others, wear a mask indoors in public if you are in an area of substantial or high transmission." Every county in Florida currently meets the definition of an "area of substantial or high transmission."

UF's August 6, 2019 The Campus Brief newsletter, authored by six of UF's upper administrators including the Provost, stated the following (emphasis added by me):

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Fall 2021 uncertainties

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Graded components of course. There will be two midterm exams, a cumulative final exam, and graded homework. Each of the midterms will count towards 20% of your course grade. The final exam will count towards 30% of your course grade, and the homework will count towards the remaining 30%. I reserve the right to adjust the percentages above in individual cases (only to a student's benefit) if I feel that circumstances warrant, but I will not answer any questions about hypothetical situations in which I might do this.

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Importance of following rules and instructions

The homework page has various important rules, including what's become a long list of rules about the format of submitted work. There has always been one simple principle behind all those rules: Don't make your work unnecessarily hard for me to read or to comment on. Said another way: Have respect for my time, and use common sense. Unfortunately, what I mean by the above has proven not to be obvious to students, leading to an ever-growing list of explicit "do"s and "don't"s.

Up through Fall 2020, at the beginning of the year I had a "grace period": on the first one or two handed-in homeworks, I only gave students warnings, not penalties, if they didn't follow my rules, and didn't really start enforcing these rules till the second or third handed-in homework. Last year, I made some other unfortunate discoveries:

  1. In any class, a significant number of students will not take a rule seriously until they have been penalized for not observing it.

  2. With an Advanced Calculus section as large as this, or in a semester starting with many uncertainties about how an evolving public-health threat might change class operations on a moment's notice, I cannot get my grading and class-prep done unless I enforce my submitted-work rules RIGIDLY.
       Last year, my past practice of simply issuing warnings, rather than applying penalties, on the first handed-in assignment, led to my spending an inordinate amount of time grading work that was unnecessarily difficult to read. This led to a long delay in my handing back that assignment, which dominoed into delays in handing back the subsequent assignments. Students who'd followed my rules suffered because of the students who hadn't. I want to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So, with regrets, this semester there will be no grace-period for not following my homework rules. Do not pick and choose which of my rules to follow. Non-observance of any of these rules will earn penalties that could lower your grade. If you get a zero score (or some other penalty for rule-violation) on a homework assignment, and are surprised by it, then you either did not do your required reading (which includes this syllabus) or did not take it seriously, both of which indicate that you do not belong in this class.

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My grading system for this course, this semester

  1. After each homework or exam, I decide grade cutoffs for that item according to the philosophy "A = excellent, B = good, C = satisfactory, D = unsatisfactory but passing". In setting these cutoffs, I do not have a predetermined grade curve or predetermined percentages for letter grades.

  2. At the end of the semester, I compute a numerical "raw score" for each student, on a 1000 point scale, using the weighting scheme stated earlier: 20% (200 points) for each midterm, 30% (300 points) for the final exam, 30% (300 points) for the homework.

    On the exams themselves, you'll see point-totals different from the ones above. These are rescaled appropriately in the raw-score computation. For example, if point-values for the problems on the first midterm add up to 138, your exam score will be multiplied by 200/138 in the above computation.

    Similarly, the homework assignments will not all be the same length and will not all count equally; they will count proportionally to the number of points in each assignment. For example, if the point-values of the homework assignments add up to 249, then your homework-point total will be multiplied by 300/249 in the raw-score computation.

  3. By applying the same weighting scheme to the cutoffs for exams and homework, I construct raw-score grade cutoffs for each of the grades A, B, C, D. The cutoffs I use for A- and B+ are the trisection points of the interval from the B cutoff to the A cutoff; the cutoffs for the B-, C+, C-, and D+ grades are computed analogously.

The grades that UF currently allows instructors to assign are A, A–, B+, B, B–, C+, C, C–, D+, D, D–, and E. (For grade-point equivalencies of these grades, see this catalog page.) All of these are grades are possible in this class, except the D–.

In my philosophy (and that of my own college professors) of what a minus-grade means, a B–, for example, is not the lower end of the B range; it is somewhat below the bottom of the B range, and means that your work falls a little short of "good". (Said another way: another professor whose regards your work as "a little short of 'good' ", but who regards B– as meaning "the low end of the 'good' range", would not assign you a B– ; he/she would assign you a C+.) This philosophy is consistent with the degree-requirements for most majors at UF: courses count towards your major only if you get a "flat" C or higher, because a C– means that your performance was less than satisfactory—not that it was barely satisfactory—and therefore that you did not satisfactorily complete the course. This philosophy is also consistent with UF's S-U grade option.

For similar reasons, I have never given the D– grade. "D" means "unsatisfactory but passing". My D cutoff is the rock bottom of what I consider to be the "passing" range, so anything below that is a failing grade, which at UF is the E grade. (Note: Because a C is usually needed for a course to count towards requirements for majors, minors, etc., an unfortunate number of faculty, advisors, and students have come to refer to every grade less than C as "failing". This is not the correct meaning of "failing grade", nor has it ever been; again see this catalog page.)

Since I don't determine the exam-grade cutoffs ahead of time, I can't tell you in advance exactly how many points you'll need to get a particular grade for the course. For examples of past grade-scales in my Advanced Calculus classes, navigate from my past classes page. However, there is no guarantee that this semester's grade cutoffs will be close to those of the past classes.
   Last year I made considerable allowances (overcompensating, in fact) because learning was so difficult under last year's conditions. I will probably not make such large allowances again, but I recognize that most of this year's MAA4211 students will have taken one or more of the prerequisites in last year's environment, and that this semester's learning environment may be very stressful for many students. As this semester proceeds, I will assess what allowances, if any, to make. I will not discuss what such hypothetical allowances might amount to. If you are worried that such an allowance could be the difference between your getting a satisfactory grade or less-than-satisfactory grade in this course, then MAA4211 is not a class you should be taking.

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Attendance policy. As this semester starts, we are now in a phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in which, unlike in earlier phases, college-age persons are at signficant risk of serious illness, and even death, from the virus. They are at even greater risk of contributing to the spread of a virus that is already putting a strain on the capacity of Florida's hospitals, including Shands-UF.
    Public health experts believe that these risks will be minimal in classes in which all students are vaccinated and wearing masks. However, while UF is recommending vaccination and expecting mask-wearing in class, the university is not requiring either of these. As long as these conditions persist, I will not require attendance.

However, the only way I will be delivering lectures is face-to-face, and during our official meeting time. You will still be responsible for knowing 100% of my lecture-content, including announcements that might be made only in class, whether or not you were there. I will not be recording lectures, and I won't use a virtual office hour to re-deliver a lecture (or portions of a lecture). If you elect not to attend a class, you will need to get good lecture notes from a classmate who did attend—not from me. (The notes I lecture from are notes from me to myself ; they are usually not suitable for student use. They can even have mistakes in them that I notice when I'm lecturing, and fix in my class presentation, but don't bother to fix in my notes.)

Students are allowed, to share their written class notes with each other; I would even encourage that this semester, During this period in which I am not requiring attendance, I have no objection to students forming groups in which they rotate who attends class and takes notes. However, students are not permitted to share their own recordings of lectures with each other, should they make any such recordings. (See In-class recording by students below.)

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In-class recording by students

Students are allowed to record video or audio of class lectures. However, the purposes for which these recordings may be used are strictly controlled. The only allowable purposes are (1) for personal educational use, (2) in connection with a complaint to the university, or (3) as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding. All other purposes are prohibited. Specifically, students may not publish recorded lectures without the written consent of the instructor.

A class lecture does not include private conversations between students, or between a student and the instructor, that happen to take place during a class session. Recording of these conversations is prohibited.

Publication without permission of the instructor is prohibited. To "publish" means to share, transmit, circulate, distribute, or provide access to a recording, regardless of format or medium, to another person (or persons), including but not limited to another student. Additionally, a recording, or transcript of a recording, is considered published if it is posted on or uploaded to, in whole or in part, any media platform, including but not limited to social media, book, magazine, newspaper, leaflet, or third party note/tutoring services. A student who publishes a recording without written consent may be subject to a civil cause of action instituted by a person injured by the publication and/or discipline under UF Regulation 4.040 Student Honor Code and Student Conduct Code.

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Accommodations for students with disabilities. If you wish to request accommodation for a disability you must first register with the Disability Resource Center. It is always important that you share your accommodation letter with your instructor, and discuss your accommodations, as early as possible in the semester.

Teaching-evaluations. Students are expected to provide professional and respectful feedback on the quality of instruction in this course by completing course evaluations online via GatorEvals. Guidance on how to give feedback in a professional and respectful manner is available at gatorevals.aa.ufl.edu/students/. Students will be notified when the evaluation period opens, and can complete evaluations through the email they receive from GatorEvals or via ufl.bluera.com/ufl/. Summaries of course-evaluation results are available to students at gatorevals.aa.ufl.edu/public-results/ .

UF Health and Wellness Resources: