Assignments

Rules for Graded Homeworks

Graded homeworks, together with quizzes, make up 50% of your grade. Here are the rules you must work by:

• Do your own work.  Copying answers is cheating and a violation of the academic honor code.  If you don't manage to get your work done before class, just take a late grade or use a drop.   Do not ask other students to copy their work, and don't let others copy yours.

• Working in a study group is fine.  But you have to be a real study group, where everyone learns, not a group of slackers leaning on one person who knows the material!  Some good rules for study groups:

  • Begin with the concepts, and discuss the material and examples before moving on to the homework.

  • When you go over the homework, you should proceed one of two ways:

1. Everybody does his/her own work, then compare the exercises.  This is often best, because the more application you do, the more practice you get, and even if your answers are wrong, making mistakes is good for your learning process.  OR

2. Each person in the group takes a turn with each exercise, and the others in the group consider the answer and agree or disagree. 

• However your group chooses to work, when you go over an exercise with someone else, make sure you understand why you make any corrections you make.  Go through the process each time to make sure you are now doing the work more effectively.  Likewise, if you are helping someone else, make sure s/he really understands the process and is not just accepting your answers.  Of course, sometimes both/all of you will be working at the same level, just helping each other avoid little errors – that’s fine too.

• For some learning styles, studying with others is a key to academic sucess.  If you know you work well in groups, try to find others you enjoy working with.  These rules are not meant to discourage group study, only to ensure that you know where to draw the line between group study, and individual work submitted for a grade.