The standard workload for a 2 unit course is 6 hours per week. I take this to be an average rather than a maximum, but my intention is not to exceed that 6 hours of work except occasionally by accident. The two hours that we meet in class; time spent reading; and time spent on assignments outside of class all count toward the 6 hour time budget.
The work for this class consists of:The weekly assignments will be done with a randomly selected partner; For the final project you may either choose a partner or do it individually.
Each week we will have a lab assignment in the form of a Jupyter notebook. Labs will be "distributed" in class on Mondays. Labs will not be turned in but all labs will have online questions which must be completed in order to get credit for the lab. The due date for each question is visible from within the Jupyter notebook generally lab questions will be due at midnight the following Sunday.
Multiple choice questions will be graded for correctness. The system indicates when an answer is wrong and prompts the user to reconsider. Second through nth correct answers will be granted 1/n points. In other words, if you get an answer wrong, you can resubmit and if you get it right on second try, you get 1/2 credit. Getting it right on the 3rd try is worth 1/3.
Short answer questions will be graded for effort: a response that is free of contempt and evidence of profound laziness will receive at least some credit.
Multiple choice questions will be worth 1 point; short answer questions will be worth 2. There will be be about 137 lab question points in the course. I recognize the my questions are far from perfect and that confusion is inevitable, I will therefore drop questions worth 20 percent of your lab grade (so as to maximize your score on labs). This I hope will eliminate the hassle of arguing about small stuff.