Math 304 Syllabus

Coordinator: Dikran Karagueuzian
Office: Whitney 110
Phone: (607) 777-2981
Office Hours: MW 4:30-6

Contacting me: please contact your section instructor first. But if you must contact me, the best way is by email: dikran@math.binghamton.edu. Do not send email to my @binghamton.edu address.

Meeting Times and Places

Please see the math department course schedules for details of meeting times and places.

Text

We will use the free textbook available here.

Grading

Your grade will be computed from your scores on homework, quizzes, tests, and the final exam, weighted according to the following table.

Homework 5%
Quizzes 15%
Tests 40%
Final Exam 40%

Homework

We will use the "WebWork" system, which was developed with an NSF grant, and is therefore free. It is your resposibility to learn how to use this system. Your login name, and your (initial) password are both the part of your Binghamton email address before the @. Thus, if you are jsmith999@binghamton.edu, your login is jsmith999 and your password is jsmith999. If you have difficulty logging in, please see here. Please log in to WebWork as soon as possible and change your password. Homework assignments will be posted there.

You will see from the table below that homework is only 5 percent of your grade. Further, answers to virtually all the homework problems are available. You might conclude from this that homework is unimportant. Do not make this mistake! A great deal of the tests and quizzes will be copies (perhaps with minor modifications) of these homework problems. You will have to do the homework!.

Quizzes

There will be several quizzes over the course of the semester. Many of the quiz problems will be taken directly from the textbook. Note that the problems on WebWork come directly from the textbook also, and these will generally not be on the quizzes. Instead, the quiz problems will be those that do not lend themselves to automated grading.

Another type of quiz problem will be one that requires you to demonstrate knowledge of an important definition or result in the textbook. Such problems will be fill-in-the-blank questions. The theorem or definition will have certain key words omitted and you will have to fill them in.

A third type of quiz problem will ask you to demonstrate knowledge of the definitions and theorems by answering True/False or multiple choice questions about them. Sample questions are available here.

Tests

There will be 2 tests during the semester, scheduled on weeknights. Dates and locations will be announced. You should figure, roughly speaking, that Test 1 will be at the end of Chapter 6, about 5 weeks into the semester, and Test 2 will be at the end of Chapter 12, roughly 10 weeks into the semester. There will also, of course, be a final exam. Problems for these tests will be largely of the three types mentioned above. Almost every problem on these tests will be something you have seen before, either as a homework problem from the text, a definition or theorem from the book, or a true/false or multiple choice question. At the risk of unnecessarily repeating myself, this means that you must do the homework.

Warning: I reserve the right to alter the problems in a modest way for the tests. For example, a matrix might be called M instead of A, and a number might be changed from 3 to 5. Multiple choice questions might have their answers reordered. This means that you have to understand the problems well enough to handle these minor alterations. If you memorize that when the vector is called w then the answer is (d), then you will fail!

Final Exam

Date and Location to be announced. See also the university's schedule of final exams.