General Policies

Academic Integrity

As a student, you should abide by the academic honesty standard of the Duke University. Its Community Standard states: Duke University is a community dedicated to scholarship, leadership, and service and to the principles of honesty, fairness, respect, and accountability. Citizens of this community commit to reflect upon and uphold these principles in all academic and nonacademic endeavors, and to protect and promote a culture of integrity.

You are responsible for knowing and adhering to academic policy and procedures as published in the Duke Community Standard Guide. Please note, an incident of behavioral infraction or academic dishonesty (cheating on a test, plagiarizing, etc.) will result in immediate action from your instructor and/or the course coordinators, in consultation with university administration (e.g., Dean of Undergraduate Studies, the Office of Student Conduct, Academic Advising).

On every exam in this course you will be required to sign a statement that you have upheld the Duke Community Standard.  Recall that when you assert that you uphold the Duke Community Standard, this includes the following assertions on your part:

On the homework assignments in this course, you are welcome to discuss the questions and trade ideas with others to help your understanding of the question and its solution.  It remains though that the written work you submit must come purely and directly from your own understanding.  Copying is not allowed; and of course writing from memory of someone else's work is just another form of copying.  Similarly, you may consult a computer algebra system or visualization tool to help your understanding, but the written work you submit must explain your understanding using ideas from the course (except to the extent that a question might explicitly direct you to use such a tool).

If a student is found responsible through the Office of  Student Conduct for academic dishonesty on a graded item in this course, the student will receive a score of zero for that assignment, and instructor reserves the right to further reduce that student's final grade for the course by up to two letter grades, at the discretion of the instructor.  If a student's admitted academic dishonesty is resolved directly through a faculty-student resolution agreement approved by the Office of Student Conduct, the terms of that agreement will dictate the grading response to the assignment at issue.

Course Communications

Students are responsible for all course communications.  This includes:
Be sure that you are appropriately set up to ensure that you receive and understand all of these communications.

To communicate with your instructor, please follow the guidelines below:

Short Term Illness

Absences from class attendance due to illness require submission of the Incapacitation Form to be excused.  Likewise for missing midterm exams, and for missing homework due dates.  (If you might miss the final exam, the Incapacitation Form will not work; you must talk to your academic dean and the instructor must then receive the dean's excuse directly from the dean.)

As is explained on that page, if you use the Incapacitation Form for a midterm exam, you are expected also to communicate with your instructor as soon as possible on the day of that exam to explain the nature of the illness and to arrange for appropriate accommodations.  This communication should ideally be in the form of an email so that there will be a record of the arranged accommodation.  Of course if you are so incapacitated that you are unable to email, they will understand.  But as soon as you are able on the day of the exam, and if at all possible before the homework or exam in question, they will need a communication from you.  If your illness becomes extended, you should keep them informed and should consider also notifying your Dean.

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The Incapacitation Form provides a formal and efficient means of communicating to your Dean and to your instructor that you have an illness that you feel prevents you from being able to participate in some graded assignment, such as homework or an exam.  The decision to provide an accommodation for the missed work remains with the instructor though -- you cannot assume that the accommodation will be provided, and thus should be prepared for the possibility that it might not.

There is some subjectivity in the use of this form, but note that on that webpage a word that is used in several places is "incapacitated".  This clearly communicates that the form is to be used for illnesses that seriously impact your ability to function.  Of course such an illness would also affect your ability to function in your other classes and other activities in which you participate.  Note the following excerpt from that webpage:
Definition of Incapacitation:  An incapacitating health issue is one in which you are hospitalized, under medical care for a short-term condition, or otherwise sufficiently debilitated as to be unable to perform basic academic tasks. Colds, headaches, or other such mild complaints that result in your feeling less than 100% are not considered incapacitating, and you should not use the Incapacitation Form in such instances.

This form is also relevant to illness at the time of a midterm exam, and not to illness before the exam which has subsided by exam day.  Of course illness before the exam might make studying more uncomfortable and inefficient, but in the days immediately preceding an exam you should have most of your studying already done anyway.  Remember, you should be studying for the exam as we go through the course, and in the days immediately preceding you should need only to review; it is part of a responsible approach to the course to be prepared for these sorts of common contingencies.  Feel free to talk to your instructor if you are unsure of whether your situation qualifies for the use of the Incapacitation Form. 

Since in most circumstances you cannot know confidently what your condition on exam day will be until that day, you should not fill out the Incapacitation Form until the day of the midterm exam.  Of course if you are in the hospital or some other situation where your condition is very predictable, then submitting the form before exam day would be reasonable.

Concerning the use of the Incapacitation Form, it is expected every student will take reasonable responsibility for their own health at least to the extent that such health is needed to be able to participate in classes.  Here are some examples:

If you are ill on the day of a midterm exam and trying to decide whether you are capable of taking it, you are welcome to come to the exam room and talk to the instructor about your situation for advice.  But, if at that time you decide to take the exam, be well aware that your decision becomes final once you begin the exam.  Having seen the content of the exam during the exam period, it is no longer acceptable to change your mind and decide that you are too ill to take it.  Incapacitation Forms will no longer be acknowledged after you have begun the exam.  The only exception to this policy will be in the case that your condition worsens dramatically during the exam period itself, which of course is very rare (as of this writing, in this professor's first 25 years of teaching I have never seen this happen).  Granting of such an exception is at the discretion of the instructor, and should not be assumed. 

Importantly, note that final exams are treated differently by Duke -- the incapacitation form will be disabled and any possible excusals must come from the student's academic dean.  See details on this in the section "Absence from a Final Exam" on the T-Reqs page on Health Issues.  Note, by the use of the term "extraordinary circumstance" in that discussion, you cannot assume that the dean will agree to excuse your absence. 

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In the case that an absence from an exam is excused, at the end of the semester the instructor will consider your performance in the course based on your existing performances on the various graded items including the final exam, with focus given to preserving the relative weights of the materials represented on those graded items and in the course.

The use of the Incapacitation Form is subject to the Duke Community Standard.  Using the form in a manner inconsistent with the above discussion will be considered as a possible violation.

"Fair Game" Material

This class, as with most math classes, is largely "vertical", in the sense that the material covered later in the course usually depends on the material from earlier in the course.  Because of this, it is not possible to make an exam that is entirely non-cumulative.  Questions on topics from later in the course unavoidably will require proficiency in topics from earlier in the course.

Nevertheless, we can still note that most problems have a primary focus, which can usually be associated to a topic covered at a specific point in the course.  Each midterm exam will have an associated range of topics from Content Syllabus that are declared to be "fair game" as a primary focus for problems on that exam.  These fair game ranges will be specified by your instructor.  Very likely (but still at the discretion of your instructor) they may not overlap (that is, if a topic is fair game as a primary focus for the first midterm, it would not be for the second midterm).  Note, these ranges refer to material from all aspects of the course -- the book, the lectures, the homework exercises, the discussion sections (for courses with discussion sections), and any other official part of the course.

If your instructor organizes their exams this way, the midterm exams could be viewed as being as non-cumulative as possible.  Still, of course, students must be sure to retain proficiency in topics that were fair game for earlier midterms, because even though those skills will not be the primary focus of problems on later midterms, they still should be considered as necessary skills in solving such problems completely.

The term "fair game" is used as an acknowledgement that for most midterms, there is not enough time to allow for testing all of the skills and concepts relevant to that exam.  Midterm exams will cover a representative sample of the relevant material, but not all of it.  Calling a topic "fair game" means that the instructor might choose to create an exam question testing a particular topic, but makes no explicit promise.

Unlike the midterm exams, the final exam is cumulative.  All of the material from the course will be fair game.

Assumptions and Intent in Exam Problems

Students should be very careful about what formulas and techniques are used in the solution to a problem.  Points will not be awarded if students simply cite formulas that were not intended to be used in the solution to the problem.

For example, consider the problem of finding the antiderivative of the function (1-4x^2)^(-1/2) with respect to x.  There are multiple expectations that an instructor might have for solutions to this problem:

   1. Some instructors might allow students to cite formulas from integration tables.  In that case, an acceptable solution to the problem would consist only of plugging in to a memorized formula.
   2. Other instructors might allow students to cite the formula for the derivative of the arcsine function, in which case an acceptable solution to this problem would require the student to perform a substitution.
   3. Another instructor might allow neither of the above, and want the student to do a trig substitution -- thus assuming even less and showing more work in the derivation of the solution.

This choice is entirely at the discretion of the instructor.  If it is not explicitly clear in the statement of the problem or from the course materials or lectures, the student should clarify before making an assumption that might well turn out to be wrong.  Misunderstandings on this do not excuse inappropriate solutions.

For most Duke math classes, students can rule out certain possibilities by some simple reasoning.  In the example above, for instance, note that the first option allows the student to come to a correct answer by having memorized a formula, without any demonstration of understanding of significant ideas or techniques.  This is not typical of math classes at Duke, and so students should not assume that such a solution would receive credit.  Both the second and third solutions above though do demonstrate understanding of important techniques, and either could reasonably be what the instructor expects; students should get clarification from the instructor.

Other conclusions can be drawn by thinking about the motivation for a given exam problem.  Suppose for example that a problem asks you to compute the derivative of the composition of two functions, h(x) = g(f(x)), where f and g are given.  The clear intent of the problem is for students to demonstrate their understanding of the chain rule by using it to derive the solution.  As this is the clear intent, students should suspect that they are supposed to do the problem that way.  Now, a correct final answer can be computed by first computing h(x) explicitly and then computing its derivative directly, with the usual shortcut rules -- but, as this method circumvents the clear purpose of the problem, students should not expect to receive credit for this. 

Remember, your solution is not graded on the correctness of the final answer, but on the extent to which you have demonstrated comprehension of the corresponding techniques and concepts.  So you should make sure to identify what those are as you work any problem.  Again, in any situation where you are unsure, you should make sure to clarify before making what might turn out to be an importantly wrong assumption.

Of course sometimes there are multiple ways to solve a problem, several of which are substantial and appropriate.  In those cases, it is not expected that the student will necessarily make the same selection as the instructor.

Fairness in Exam Working Time

For fairness to all students, it is important that, during each exam, all students must have the same amount of time to work on the problems. 

Making sure that all students get the same amount of time on the exam is accomplished by two steps -- starting everyone at the same time, and ending everyone at the same time.  At the beginning of the exam your instructor will pass out the exams and tell students not to turn over the cover page until everyone else has a copy of the exam and the instructor says "begin".  When time runs out at the end of the exam, some students might be right in the middle of something and need just a few seconds to finish a last little bit; with that in mind, when time runs out your instructor may provide a few additional seconds (usually 10-15 seconds) for students to wrap it up.  After that time, all students must immediately cease all writing. 

Note the following, from the Duke Community Standard In Practice: A Guide for Undergraduates, specifically in the section on Academic Dishonesty, among the list of forms of cheating:
Note also the following from the same document, specifically in the section on Failure to Comply:
A student or group may be held accountable for failure to comply with:

Some students may be accustomed to getting away with continuing to write for a minute or two after the official end of the exam -- perhaps because they are accustomed to being unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of other students getting up and turning in their papers, or perhaps because this sort of thing was condoned or even accepted in their high school math courses.

Students should be very clear that it is critically important to the fairness of the course that they do indeed stop when instructed to do so.  If any writing on the exam paper should take place after the instructor has very clearly called the end of the exam, that instructor may consider this to be a clear and deliberate violation of both of the above cited aspects of the Duke Community Standard, and notify the Office of Student Conduct.

Exam rubrics and subjectivity

Very often, a grader will establish a grading rubric in order to aid in the consistency of evaluation over large numbers of students.  For example, the grader might decide that one particular part of the problem is worth some number of points, or certain steps (or errors) are worth some number of points.  These sorts of systems are useful tools for graders.

It should be emphasized however that these systems are decided on by the grader voluntarily, and for the purpose of assisting the grader.  It is not to be assumed from the existence of such a system that the grader abdicates his or her right to form any opinion about the quality of a student's work.

For example, note that on a given question (on an exam, for instance), there might be multiple ways to work the problem; and even worse, there are countless ways that a student can make mistakes.  A given system might allow the grader conveniently to determine grades for most papers, but for another paper the system might not have been set up to account for the pecularities in that particular paper.  In such a case, the grader is entirely within their rights, and in fact obligated, to award points based on their honest assessment of the overall quality of the work, even if that is inconsistent with the rubric.

Scores on homeworks and exams will be determined entirely by the corresponding grader's considered opinion as to the quality of the work done by the student.  Systems are useful tools to help the grader achieve that goal, but ultimately it is only the opinion of the grader that determines the points awarded.

Exam Rules

The following rules apply to all exams in this course.  Some of these rules relate to the fact that exam papers must be scanned, using a stack scanner, whose operation is delicate in various ways that must be respected to allow it to operate as needed.  Violation of these rules may result in points being deducted!  Depending on the situation they may instead/also be viewed as violations of the Duke Community Standard.