Ok, so about Homework #4. I didn’t want to give it back to you before the exam, but because I gave it back after the exam, I didn’t get much chance to say anything about it.

The scores were overall quite low. You probably got a lower score than you might have hoped for on this, but also know that so did everybody else. I think this was in large part due to lots of little fractional points coming off for things that were asked for in the instructions but not included on the homework, or not consistently included. I did, as I mentioned in the key, try to set it up so actually producing each step individually was not strictly required in order to get all of the points, but the tendency would still be that, if the tree were produced only in its final state, many other things didn’t quite get notated, like what operation joined every pair of nodes in the structure, etc. I think more than usual so far, there was less care than I’d have hoped for in trying to make sure that everything asked for in the instructions was actually addressed in what got turned in.

I’m not sure whether I’ll do anything special about the scores for this homework or not as I integrate it into the overall homework score, I might, but I have to decide how best to handle it. However, to the extent that there were actual misunderstandings about the content of the homework, I also want to address those, and pretty much right away. There will be a fair amount of tree drawing of this sort in the future, and the material winds up being pretty cumulative, so I want to make sure that everyone has a handle on how these trees come to be, and why they look the way they do.

My plan is to take some time in the next class, Tuesday, to go through the problems on that homework, just to walk through it, and to answer any questions that come up. And perhaps I’ll also do another one or two examples just for good measure, though I think I’ll probably save that for about a week later, when we’ve added in a couple more pieces to make the system a bit more complete.

So: bring your homework #4 with you on Tuesday to refer to, and any questions you had on it as well, and I’ll see if we can get ourselves to a point where we’re all “on the same page” about how everything works to this point.