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.”

The keys for homework #1 and #2 are now linked to the schedule page. To download them, you’ll need the password that was given out in class. Ask me in class or email me if you have forgotten this password.

Looking at homework #4, I realize that we didn’t get to the material that is relevant for doing sentence (2) in section 1. We will talk about that on Tuesday, and it’s discussed in the book and on the handout. You might want to wait on that one until Tuesday. The rest of it should concern only material that we talked about in class.

Though class starts in 20 minutes, let me anyway point out that it was actually something like a typo on the homework that the directions to which Part III referred said that you should expect to have four steps. Part II has four steps. Part III only has three steps, since it has fewer lexical items involved.

Very quick note on homework #3, part 1: In case this wasn’t clear, you are being asked to provide the theta roles and the arguments for each of the sentences, including both the (a) sentences and the (b) sentences. Doing this will also make it much clearer what I’m asking in part 2.

Also, on part 2: Keep in mind that this part of the homework is about theta-roles, the answer I’m after is likely to have something to do with that.

I believe that I have now emailed back all of the homeworks #2 that I had in electronic form. If you didn’t get the homework either in person in class or emailed back to you, and you think that you should have, then let me know.

On homework #2, you are asked to draw a couple of trees. Draw them as per the instructions: no node labels, and only nodes that you have evidence for (and triangles over strings of words with no brackets). Don’t use anything like VP, V’, etc. This isn’t a test to see if you remember what happened in LX250, we’re developing the syntactic system from the ground up, and there will ultimately be some (usually slight) differences between the “X-bar” notation that you would have used in LX250 and the notation we’ll use in this class.

So, the goal of the first couple of trees is to mark out the constituents that we have evidence for, based on all that writing of sentences that you did. And the last couple of trees should have about the same level of detail. We’ll get to node labels very soon now, these are the last trees you’ll be drawing without some kind of labels, but for these particular trees, they should be label-free.

For those who will soon be getting their electronically submitted homework back, or for those who picked up their written homework either in LX500 or in my office, the score on the homework is out of 35. I will be putting up a key shortly, so you can see a little bit more explanation of the answers I had in mind. If you got a lowish score, do not despair, though: I am not grading these on a strict 90-80-70-60 scale, so a score of 21 is not, I repeat not, the numerical analog of a D. It’ll be much better than that, though the specifics will depend a bit on how people do in general over the semester (the idea is to grade these on the basis of what was possible, given the difficulty of the problems and factoring out the effects of poorly-worded questions).

I anticipate having all of the homework assignments be scored out of 35, but these points are pretty abstract, they aren’t comparable to points on a test, only to points on other homework.

I will also put the scores up on the Blackboard site before long, and I intend to continue posting scores there throughout the semester so that you will be able to look to see what you’ve been getting. That is going to be pretty much the only function of the Blackboard site, though.