One thing that I haven’t been perhaps clear enough on so far is what these numbers on the homework actually mean. The scores on the homework will generally be out of 35. The homework score constitutes 40% of the final grade. That’s a lot. It’s important to do the homework, more is riding on that than is riding on either the midterm or the final individually.

In order to reduce the pressure a bit, the lowest homework score you get over the semester will automatically be dropped. In past years I have also made available one or two “extra credit” assignments that can be used to take the place of the next lowest homework score. The schedule as it stands has 10 homework assignments in it, which means that 9 of them will count.

As for how to understand the numbers themselves: There might be some variation here (depending mainly on how hard the homework problems turn out to be), but it is a pretty good estimate to take 29 and above as some flavor of “A,” 21 and above as some flavor of “B,” 13 and above as some flavor of “C.”

That looks pretty lenient, but here’s why: I know the homework (and the material) can be difficult, and I know that there are places where the instructions may wind up not being as clear as they maybe could have been. I ask the grader to generally be pretty picky, but on the other hand I leave some slack in my interpretation of the scores. I find this to be a better system than trying to design homework that is exactly the right difficulty level as to fit a standard 90-80-70-60 grade scheme, since I would surely not succeed at that anyway.

This almost certainly means that you’re doing better gradewise than you thought, and that’s good, I don’t want to stress you out unduly. (I also don’t want you to relax entirely, though!)

The midterm and final are not graded in quite the same way (they will be graded more strictly, and by me, not by the grader), because they are in some sense easier and more straightforward. But you will also have a lot to work with in preparing for them, since I will give you the tests (and keys) from the last couple of years to practice on.

So, it should be possible to come through the class with a pretty good grade if you work at it, I’ve left a fair amount of leeway for doing that. I don’t have any kind of “curve” to guarantee that someone gets a low grade for every person that gets a high grade; if everyone earns an “A”, then everyone gets an “A.”