If you were wondering what I had in mind for some of those questions on the final, I have now posted the key for the Fall 2010 final with notes.

I will have the scores for the final posted on Blackboard soon, at least by mid-day tomorrow. When you see your score, don’t panic immediately. The score:grade correspondence is pretty benevolent, as it was on the midterm. Specifically, a score of n or over = grade for: 69=A, 63=A–, 57=B+, 51=B, 45=B–, 39=C+, 33=C, 27=C–, etc.

The overall course grade will put together the various grades (final, midterm, homework) in the proportions given at the beginning on the syllabus sheets.

Also: the deadline for extra-credit homework is today (Friday), if you’re planning to hand any in. If you’re going to bring it to my office, please do so before 5pm, and if you’re going to email it to me you can take a little bit longer.

On the topic of what material will be included in the final: Given the cumulative nature of what we’ve been doing, there is a sense in which the material will cover the whole semester, although for the most part it will be more focused on things like what we’ve been doing in the later part of the course.

When you are looking at the practice finals, it is probably worth keeping in mind that the previous years got a little bit further. In particular, they had seen the wh-movement and islands stuff about a week earlier in the semester, rather than right at the end. So, there are a number of questions on these practice finals about identifying islands or doing wh-movement. These won’t be featured as prominently on this year’s final, though I still might have a question or two. So, don’t panic if you feel like there’s a lot of stuff in the practice finals based on the material in the very last lecture of the semester.

In general, I consider anything we covered in class or was part of a homework assignment to be “fair game” for the final, and the practice finals should give you a pretty good idea of the sort of thing I’ll be asking about.

There is now an extra credit assignment that you can do, and here is how it will work.

Extra credit: Trees are easy to draw (this is a link to the PDF)

The assignment is to run through a discussion of Trees are easy to draw, filling in parts of the analysis where indicated.

NOTE: This is significantly revised from the version that I had in class on Thursday. I did not hand that one out, but a few people did take copies of it. If you took one, don’t use it, use the one that I linked to here instead. Also, I had considered making homework #9 another option for extra credit, but I have abandoned that as a possibility. If you picked one of those up, you can feel free to play with it for fun, but that’s about all.

This is due on Friday, two days after the final, by 5pm.

The way the scoring will work is as follows: I already drop your lowest homework score. Points from this will be used to replace your second-lowest homework score. There are 30 points available on this assignment, so in principle you could get more than 100% of the usual 20 points per homework. If your score exceeds 20, the additional points will be averaged into the rest of your homework score. If you already handed in BUCLD summaries, you probably already have 20 points replacing your second-lowest homework score; in that case, up to 10 points from this extra credit assignment are still available.