Professor David Groisser
308 Little Hall
392-0281 extension 261
groisser@ufl.edu or groisser@math.ufl.edu (both addresses work). BEFORE EMAILING ME, READ THIS:
- I will not answer math questions by email.
- I will never provide any grade information by email.
- I will not answer anonymous email, or email that lacks an informative subject line.
- Include your full name and an informative subject line in all email correspondence with me.
- If it takes me more than two seconds to figure out who you are without opening your email, expect me to delete it unread. When I see your email listed in my inbox, in the "Sender" field I should see something like "John Jones", or "jj@ufl.edu (John Jones)", or "johnjones@ufl.edu"; I should not see only something like "jj@ufl.edu" or "gr8g8r@hotmail.com". If you wish to send me email, please configure your mailer accordingly. If you are unwilling or unable to do this, please restrict your communication with me to face-to-face meetings, telephone conversations, hand-written notes, and snail mail.
- For reasons of time and safety, I delete, without reading completely, any email that requires me to open an attachment whose nature or purpose I cannot easily determine without opening.
Office Hours: Tentatively Monday 5th period (11:45-12:35), Tuesday 8th period (3:00-3:50), and Friday 4th period (10:40-11:30). Please come early in the period or let me know to expect you later; otherwise I may not stay in my office for the whole period. See my schedule for updates. Students who can't make scheduled office hours may see me by appointment on most weekdays (but never on Thursday).
Text: Rosenlicht, Introduction to Analysis . We will cover Chapters 6-10, possibly with some omissions. Topics will include: a careful treatment of integration of functions of one variable, sequences and series of functions, differentiation of integrals depending on a parameter, the Fundamental Theorem of Ordinary Differential Equations, partial differentiation, the Implicit Function Theorem, and multiple integrals.
Homework: There will be regular homework assignments. A subset of the exercises will be collected at intervals of from one to two weeks. Do the homework when I assign it; if you procrastinate until the due-date is announced, you won't finish the homework in time. To help motivate you to do all the assigned problems, I will not announce which ones I am collecting until shortly before they are due.
The length and frequency of assigments will vary. Please see the homework page for rules concerning homework. Assignments will be posted on this page in due course.
I am likely to assign and collect more homework than Dr. McCullough did. The last time I taught this class (2002), I assigned 78 homework problems over the course of the semester, 42 of which I collected. This does not include 14 extra-credit hand-in problems. (Note: in making these counts and the ones below, I counted n-part problems as n separate problems.) I expect to assign roughly as many problems this semester, but since your class is twice as large as my 2002 class, I will probably collect fewer problems this time.
To help you estimate the workload difference between last semester and this one: Dr. McCullough assigned 19 problems (counting the first assignment, a nominally six-part problem to which Dr. M added three parts, as nine problems), all of which he collected. He additionally listed 70 "suggested" problems, but do not mistake any of my assigned problems for one that is merely being "suggested", just because I am not collecting that problem. The amount of work that I require of you, and how much I am able to police, are different. (An analogy: you are required, by law, to stop at every red light, not just the ones that have police cars sitting there. Bad things happen when you don't, and "but there was no policeman there" is not an excuse that stands up in court. When I decide what's fair game for an exam, I will assume that you have done, or at least seriously attempted, every assigned problem.)
You may see what I assigned the last time I taught MAA 4212 by going here. There will probably be a good deal of overlap between those assignments and what I assign this semester, starting with the second assignment of 2002. (Like Dr. King in Fall 2008, I did not get all the way through Chapter 5 in Fall 2001.)
I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of doing the homework. The last time I taught MAA 4211,
(I am giving the statistics for MAA 4211, rather than MAA 4212, because the six students who received grades below C in the fall did not continue into the second semester.)
- no student who turned in every homework assignment received a final grade lower than C,
- every student who received a D+ or worse had failed to hand in at least two homeworks,
- no student received a grade higher than C+ without handing in all the assignments, and
- the average grade of students who handed in all the assignments was 3.1 on the usual 4-point scale, while the average grade of all students in the class was 2.3.
Exams: There will be 2 midterms and a final. I have not yet decided whether these will be in-class or take-home exams; there may be some of each type. I prefer take-home exams for a class at this level, and have never given an in-class exam in MAA 4211 or MAA 4212 before, but the logistics of security and grading of take-home exams are more difficult in a class as large as this. I may try to arrange for two-hour non-take-home midterms a three-hour non-take-home final ("in class" exams, but not literally). If I do give you take-home exams, I will probably give you 48 hours for a midterm and either 48 or 72 hours for the final.
I plan to give the midterms at approximately 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the semester (approximately Mon. Feb. 9 and Fri. Mar. 20, respectively). If we have a non-take-home final, it will be in the time-slot assigned us by the Registrar (Fri. May 1, 7:30-9:30 a.m.) or in a three-hour time-slot on May 1. If we have a take-home final, I may allow different students to pick up and return their exams at different times, to work around their other exams as best possible, but no one will be allowed to start a take-home final before the official start of UF's final exam period (Sat. Apr. 25, 7:30 a.m.) or to hand it in after Fri. May 1, 9:30 a.m.
Grading. The system I use in this class is based on the premise that some people put their best foot forward on homework and some do it on exams. It works as follows:
The last time I taught MAA 4211-12, the class GPA was 2.33 in the fall (with 18 students finishing the course, out of 23 who started) and 2.73 in the spring (with 11 students finishing the course, out of 13 who started). For more specifics on the grade-distributions, please see my MAA 4211 Fall 2001 and MAA 4212 Spring 2002 grade-scale pages. (Scroll to the bottom of each page for the final course-grade distribution.) I think that the weighting schemes above are varied enough to allow every student a reasonable chance to show me his or her best work, while at the same time not allowing anyone to completely throw away low scores that do, in fact, tell me something. If anyone has another reasonable weighting scheme he or she thinks should be on the list above, I'll consider it, provided it is presented to me early enough. If at the end of the semester, none of the above schemes is giving you the grade you want, that will not be a good enough reason for me to consider another scheme in which your best component is given inordinately high weight, and your worst component inordinately low weight.
- After each homework or exam, I decide a grade scale for that item according to the philosophy ``A = excellent, B = good, C = satisfactory, D = unsatisfactory but passing''. In setting these cutoffs, I don't have a predetermined grade curve or predetermined percentages for letter grades.
- At the end of the semester, I compute a numerical ``raw score'' for each student according to three different weighting schemes:
- 20% each midterm (total 40%), 20% final, 40% homework;
- 20% each midterm, 40% final, 20% homework;
- 15% each midterm (total 30%), 30% final, 40% homework.
- By applying the same weighting schemes to the cutoffs for exams and homework, I construct three different sets of raw-score grade cutoffs. The homework assignments do not all count equally; longer assignments count more than shorter assignments.
- Using these data, I obtain three letter grades for each student. The final grade I assign is the highest of these three.
Attendance. Students are expected to attend every lecture, barring such things as illness, family emergencies, and religious holidays of which I am informed in advance.
Student Honor Code: Students are expected to abide by the the Honor Code:
We, the members of the University of Florida community, pledge to hold ourselves and our peers to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.On all work submitted for credit by students at the university, the following pledge is either required or implied: "On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment."Accommodations for students with disabilities: Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the Instructor when requesting accommodation.
Miscellaneous: Unless I say otherwise, you are responsible for knowing any material I cover in class, any subject covered in homework, and all the material in the textbook chapters we are studying. You are also responsible for the material covered in Dr. McCullough's section of MAA 4211 and for most of MAS 4105 and the calculus 1-2-3 sequence (MAC 2311-12-13 or the equivalent). However, remember you should not base any proofs in this class on theorems that were stated but not proved in the lower-level calculus sequence (unless we have previously proved these theorems in MAA 4211-12).