Assignments

There will be weekly homework assignments due on Tuesdays before class starts. The first assignment is due on September 10. The last one may be due on December 10, the last day of classes.

Most of your learning will take place while doing the homework, and it will count heavily toward the final grade. The remainder of the grade will be based on a midterm and a final exam.

The homework goes along with what is happening in class. For this and other reasons, I will not accept late homework except in very unusual circumstances. I will, however, drop the lowest homework grade.

Writing

Homework should be legible and neat, and the pages should be stapled together. Don't turn in your first draft. You may find it useful to write your solutions in LaTeX. It will be time consuming at first (if you don't already know LaTeX), but you will end up with a valuable skill that you will soon need.

Proofs should be written clearly and completely, using good English, complete sentences, and adequate detail. A good guideline is that you should write your proofs the way you would like to see them written in your textbook. Another way to say this is that your proofs should be understandable to the average student in the class.

You may be surprised to discover how much you learn in the process of writing homework solutions carefully. A great deal of consolidation of your knowledge takes place in the process. Please take this aspect of the homework seriously.

Collaborating

You are doing the homework to learn the material. Copying someone else's homework or copying solutions from the internet or elsewhere and presenting them as your own defeats the purpose of homework (and violates Cornell's Academic Integrity Code).

I have no objection in principle to collaboration on the homework, provided it improves learning for all people involved. One person simply telling another how to do a problem defeats the learning purpose of the homework. You get maximum benefit from a homework problem if you work hard on it alone before combining your ideas with someone else's. In any case, the paper that you turn in with your name on it should represent your own solutions, written in your own words, regardless of whether you arrived at some of those solutions in collaboration with others.

Collaboration on the midterm and final is not allowed. Please do not discuss the exams with anyone else, either during the course or after it ends.