tobias.johnson@csi.cuny.edu
Office hours: Monday 2-3pm; Wednesday 1-3pm, via Zoom
I posted final course grades on Blackboard last night. I haven't officially submitted them to the registrar yet but am planning to do so soon. So please let me know as soon as you can if you notice any grading mistakes.
I've finished grading the final and have posted solutions. If you're confused about why you lost points on a problem or think you deserve more credit, send me an email as soon as you can. You can interpret a score of 25–36 as a C, a score of 37–52 as a B, and a score of 53–70 as an A.
I still haven't finished totaling up your grades for the class, but I'll get it done before I go to sleep tonight, and I'll post your grade on Blackboard. I'll send the official final grades to the registrar tomorrow.
I've extended the due date of yesterday's homework for one more day. It's now due (still for full credit) tonight at 11:59pm, after which it will close and the answers will appear.
I've posted a bunch of practice problems for the final. I set it as due Friday night so that the solutions appear after that.
Here is a collection of sample problems to help you study for the final (these come from Prof. Joseph Maher's archive). I'll post some Webwork problems too, next week. I'm not going to post a set of solutions to these, so please feel free to email me if you're stuck on a problem or just want to check if your answer is correct.
The final will be on Monday, December 14, from 10:10am to 12:05pm. It will have the same format as the midterms. It will be cumulative, though there will be more of a focus on more recent material.
For class on Monday, December 7, the lectures are:
A few people have been asking me some questions about exactly how I'll be computing your grades. Rather than answer them one at a time, let me just lay out in as much detail as I can how I'll do it. There are seven categories that go into your grade: class participation, homework, quizzes, exam #1, exam #2, exam #2, and the final. For each category, I'll make a score for you on the numeric scale 0-100. Think of 90-100 as an A, 80-89 as a B, etc. For the exams, if I said that a score of 52-70 corresponded to an A, it means that I'll convert a score of 52 to a 90 on the 100-point scale and a score of 70 to an 100. For the homework and quizzes, I don't decide exactly how I'll convert your scores to a numeric grade until I sit down to do. For class participation, if you've been interacting with me in class you'll get an 100. Once I've made a numeric grade in each category, I'll take an average of them weighted according to the syllabus. Then I make a letter grade out of these, generally by setting 90-100 as an A, 80-89 as a B, etc., though I look at the list of scores and actually think about where to draw the line between each letter grade (including the plus and minuses) in order to be fair. And also if anyone has shown extreme improvement from the beginning to the end of the class, I bump up their grade by one notch (but note that I really mean extreme improvement—usually this applies to either zero or one student in the class). Also, I do a bit more fudging if I think things are unfair. For example, if an exam was very hard, I'll often convert a perfect score on it to something higher than 100 on the 0-100 scale.
I think that's about everything there is to say about grading. You can get a very good sense of where you are by looking at your exam grades, considering your score according the gradescales for each exam that I gave on this site. You can find them by searching through the old announcements.
For class on Wednesday, December 2, the lectures are:
Recommended problems are Problem 1 and Problem 2 on Lesson51.
For our next class on Monday, November 30th, the lectures are:
Recommended problems are Problem 7 on Lesson47 and Problem 3 on Lesson49.
I've finished grading the exam and have posted solutions. If you're confused about why you lost points on a problem or think you deserve more credit, don't hesitate to send me an email. You can interpret a score of 31–38 as a C, a score of 39–51 as a B, and a score of 52–70 as an A.
Performances on this exam ranged more widely than they usually do. Many people did exceptionally well (the top four scores were 70, 70, 69, and 68), but more people than usual were completely lost with this material. The one error that stood out was that on the Taylor polynomial error bound problem, many people just plugged the value into \( f(x) \) and into \( T_3(x) \) and evaluated the difference. But the problem wasn't asking you to find this value. It was asking you to find the upper bound on this value given by the Taylor polynomial upper bound \( \frac{K \lvert x-c\rvert^{n+1}}{(n+1)!} \). Besides that, the most common mistakes were writing bad explanations for the convergence/divergence of the series. If you wrote something and you're confused about why I marked points off for it, I really encourage you to write to me to ask in more detail. (And if you did write to me and haven't heard from me yet, expect a response soon.) There will be problems like this on the final, so it's worth the effort to get it right.
See you on Monday and have a happy Thanksgiving!
The third exam will be on Monday, November 23, at 10:10am (regardless of which session you belong to).
Tomorrow in class we'll do study for our next exam. We will not discuss Section 11.1
as shown on the calendar, so please feel free to watch those
lectures anytime over Thanksgiving break.
The exam will cover all of Chapter 10, plus Section 8.2. Its format will be the usual,
on Webwork, and as usual you are free to use your
notes, textbook, and other class material, but you may not use
outside resources, including the wider internet, other people in the class, or other people outside
of the class. You can use a calculator if you'd like, and Webwork will also happily
accept an answer written out like 5 * (e^(-3 + 5/2) - e^2).
I've put up a some practice problems. Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions about them or anything else!
I've reopened the homework that was due yesterday until Sunday, because I got a few emails with questions that I didn't answer until today. So Lesson36 and Lesson38 are now due at 11:59pm on Sunday, November 15th.
For class on Monday, November 16th, the lectures are:
Recommended problems are Problem 1 and Problem 4 on Lesson45.
Here is the problem we'll work on today after the quiz. Update: Here are the solutions. And the quizzes are all graded now.
There will be a quiz tomorrow covering Sections 10.2–10.5 of the textbook. Questions will be along the lines of homework problems, asking about whether series are convergent or divergent and why.
For class on Wednesday, November 11th, the lectures are:
Recommended problems are Problem 4 and Problem 5 on Lesson40.
For class on Monday, November 9th, the lectures are:
Our final will be on Monday, December 14th, at our usual class meeting time. I don't have anything more to say about it yet, but I just wanted to get it up on the calendar so you can plan around it.
For class tomorrow, the lectures are:
Recommended problems to try to solve before class are Problem #1 and Problem #3 from Lesson36.
Here are the problems that we'll work on in class today. Update: Here are the solutions.
For class on Monday, November 2, the lectures are:
Recommended problems for class are Problem #1 and Problem #6 on Lesson34.
For class on Wednesday, the lectures are:
Recommended problem to look at before class in Problem #1 on Lesson32.
Here are the problems for today's class. Update: Here are the solutions, along with the discussion of Problem #6 from Lesson28.
For class on Monday, October 26, the lectures are:
Suggested problems to prepare for class that day are #1 and #7 from Lesson30.
For class tomorrow, the lectures are:
The suggested problems to look at to prepare for class are #1 and #2 from Lesson28.
I've finished grading Exam #2 and posted the solutions in Webwork. You can see your total grade for the exam by going to the Grades page on Webwork and looking at your score or percentage on the exam. And on the Exam #2 page, you can see what you got on each question, reflecting the partial credit I added. I've also finally put the first exam grade into Blackboard, and I'll put in the second one later this week after I hear from you about any grading mistakes I made.
To interpret your score on the exam, please consider scores of 53-70 to be As, scores of 36-52 to be Bs, and scores of 28-35 to be Cs.
Here are the solutions to the problems from class today.
A few people asked me if there will be multiple attempts allowed on the exam on Monday.
In my second session, I said that I'd decided against this because there were some logistical
problems with it. I just wanted to explain the issue in more detail. Basically, there are some
problems I want to include that must have one attempt only (e.g., multiple choice problems).
Webwork wasn't really designed for giving tests, and when I have it give the questions in a random order,
it doesn't change the number of attempts depending on the order of the problems! So all problems
must have the same number of attempts. So, I'm going to keep it as one attempt only per problem.
But as before I'll grade by hand to make sure typos and the like don't hurt your grade.
I'm also happy to take into consideration what you tell me in emails, etc. I'd also urge you to
use the preview button before submitting your answer. It will show you how Webwork
is interpreting your answer, and so if you type in 1/2x, you'll find out
that it's being interpreted as \( \frac{1}{2}x \) rather than \( \frac{1}{2x} \)
before you submit your answer.
Here are some review problems that we'll work on in class today.
This is just to say that there are no recommended problems on Section 10.1 for tomorrow because we'll spend class working on some problems to review for the midterm.
I put up some practice problems to review for the midterm on October 19. You can also find some good problems on Prof. Joseph Maher's archive from his class last year—Midterms 1 and 2 both have good problems for you (his midterm timing was different from ours).
The midterm will be on Webwork as before, with a similar format. It will cover all of Chapter 7, plus sections 6.3 and 6.4 on volumes of revolution.
I've posted today's problems for class on improper integrals. Update: Here are the solutions to today's problems.
For class on Wednesday, October 7, the lectures are:
The suggested problem to look at is Problem 2 from Lesson24.
For class on Monday, October 5, here are the lectures to watch:
There aren't any essential problems to look at, though it might be helpful to get started on Lesson20.
We'll also be spending some time on Monday going over the quiz and talking about disc integration and shell integration, so please check out the quiz solutions on Webwork before class.
Here are solutions to the problems from class today.
I've also finished my manual grading of the quizzes, and I've posted the solutions on Webwork. Please let me know if I messed anything up (or if you just want to check if I messed anything up).
Here are today's problems.
Here are solutions to today's problems from class.
See you again tomorrow! See below for tomorrow's lectures and recommended problems.
Here are the problems we'll work on in class today.
Here are the lectures not for the next class (see below!) but for the class after, on Wednesday, September 30:
There's a final lecture from Section 7.5 that I've put off until the next class, because I feel like the lectures have already been long enough this week. But if you want to get ahead and watch it now, here it is:
For class on Wednesday, September 30, please take a look at Problem 2 from Lesson18.
Next week, the CUNY schedule is weird. Monday is a day off, and then classes are meeting on Tuesday with a Monday schedule. So, our next class will be on Tuesday, September 29. Here are the lectures for then:
The recommended problem to look at to get ready for class is Problem #2 from Lesson16.
Here are the solutions to today's problems. And also here's a video of me going over Problem #2 from the cylindrical shells problem set.
Sorry I haven't posted next week's lectures yet! I'll have them up later today.
Here are the problems we'll work on today in class.
I should have mentioned this before, but please let me know if your exam is misgraded in any way. I tried to go through and add back points if you lost them because of a typo or similar thing. But if you think you deserve more credit on any problems, don't hesitate to ask. I'll be more generous than I usually am when grading exams on paper.
The lectures to watch for tomorrow (Wednesday, September 23) are:
We'll also work a bit on cylindrical shells, whose videos were assigned last week, though we haven't covered them at all yet:
To prepare for class tomorrow, take a look at Lesson11 #2 and Lesson13 #1.
I've finished all the manual grading for Exam #1 and posted the solutions in Webwork. You can see your total grade for the exam by going to the Grades page on Webwork and looking at your score or percentage on the exam. And on the Exam #1 page, you can see what you got on each question. These scores should reflect any manual adjustments I made to correct for typos, etc., when you put in answers. I also elected to give everyone credit for the problem of rotating the region under \( y = 19-2x^2 \) from \( x = 0 \) to \( x = 4 \) around the x-axis to form a solid and finding its volume (your numbers will vary). The problem is that I meant to set it up so that this curve was always above the x-axis, but depending on the random parameters for the version of the problem you got, this wasn't true, which makes the problem a lot more complicated. I think the only fair thing is to give everyone credit. My apologies if you solved the problem correctly (or perhaps solved the harder version correctly!) and are now just getting the same score as everyone else. It's a lot harder to assess how much you know this semester, and I'm going to err on the side of generosity when it comes to this.
To interpret your score on the exam, please consider scores of 47-60 to be As, scores of 31-46 to be Bs. Nobody scored below this so I'm not going to bother giving ranges for Cs, Ds, and Fs.
This announcement shouldn't have much in the way of new information, but I wanted to have it all here in once place. The midterm will start for everyone at 10:10am on Monday, September 21, regardless of your section. It will be on Webwork, like the last quiz. Like that quiz, you'll have only one submission on each problem, and you have to go in order. The exam will cover up to and including Section 6.3. We will meet on Zoom as usual in case you want to ask me questions or I need to make any announcements.
During the exam, you are free to use your
notes, textbook, and other class material, but you may not use
outside resources, including the wider internet, other people in the class, or other people outside
of the class. You can also use a calculator if you'd like. Note that Webwork will also happily
accept an answer written out like 5 * (e^(-3 + 5/2) - e^2).
Here are solutions to the practice problems from class today. Also, here is an extra assignment of practice problems on Webwork. It's not mandatory and it doesn't count for anything, but it's a good source of practice problems to help you review for the midterm. I've set the assignment to close on Saturday night so that you can see solutions on Sunday, but feel free to email me before then if you're stuck on a problem and want a hint.
Here are some practice problems for the exam on Monday. Look over these problems for class tomorrow. Since Section 6.4 won't be on the exam, we'll hold off on working on it until next week (though I do still recommend you stay up to date watching the lectures).
Here are solutions to today's problems that we worked on in class.
The solutions to the quiz problems are now available on WebWork. Let me know about any technical problems you experienced with the quiz.
Here is a problem that we'll work on in class today after the quiz.
I got an email asking about this, so I just wanted to clarify for everyone: just attend class at your usual time tomorrow. For midterms, everyone will take the test at the same time, but for quizzes like we're having tomorrow, they'll just happen at some point during your usual class meeting.
I've mentioned that we're going to have unannounced pop quizzes during our class meetings. I'm going to be extra nice and warn you that the first one is coming on Monday. There's going to be one question from Section 6.1 and one from Section 6.2 (it will be on computing volumes). It's going to be on Webwork, just like the homework, but with a few differences. First, you only get one submission per problem. So, on the volume problem, you'll have to answer all parts of the question and only then submit, and then you're done with that problem. Second, you have to do the problems in order—there's no skipping ahead to the next problem and returning like you might do taking a paper test. (The idea of this is to make it harder for people to cheat by discussing the problems with other people in the class.) Even though you only get one submission, I'm setting up the problems so that there will be partial credit. But don't worry about that as you're working, and just try to solve the problems. If you have any tech issues (internet outages, etc.), just let me know what's going on as soon as you can, and we'll deal with it.
I should also mention that we're going to have our first exam on Monday, September 21. It will also be on Webwork and will cover all the class material through the end of Section 6.3. Remember that it will take up the entire 10:10–12 class period. I'll talk a bit more about it on Monday, and we'll do some reviewing in class on Wednesday next week.
Here are two videos from class today: the first video goes over a problem from Section 5.8 and also discusses Problem 5 from Webwork Lesson 3. The second video goes over the solutions to the problems we worked on in class.
For Monday, September 14, the lectures to watch are:
Look at Problem 3 from Lesson09 before class.
Here are the problems that we'll work on in class today.
Here are full solutions to the problems from today's class.
Monday is a holiday. For Wednesday, September 9, the lectures to watch are:
I owe you a bit of explanation for why we're going out of order with Section 5.8. It's supposed to be review (though in my experience many sections of Math 231 just barely cover it), and it's conceptually straightforward, just a few antiderivatives to learn. I thought it was a bit much to ask you to watch those lectures for today and I wanted to start doing new material sooner, so I delayed it for a week. It's relatively unimportant, compared to Section 6.2.
For class on September 9, the recommended problems to look at before class are:
Here are the problems to discuss in class today.
Here are the lecture videos for Wednesday. Note that these lectures weren't covered in Math 231—your first all new material of the year.
To get ready for class, just try to do problem #1 from problem set Lesson05.
Here are some problems we'll discuss in today's class. I'll also send them out through Zoom but I figured I might as well post them here as well.
This is just to let you know that you should have gotten an email with a message telling you whether you're in the 10:10 or the 11:10 session for Monday and giving you a Zoom link. Please email me if you didn't get this. Or just show up to whatever session on Monday (Zoom links are posted on Blackboard).
This is a reminder that you need to watch the following videos before class on Monday:
To get ready for class on Monday, please take a look at (and ideally, solve!) the following problems from Webwork:
I've posted solutions to the problems we did in class yesterday.
Also, I'll be emailing you today to let you know if you're in the 10:10 or 11:10 class session. The majority of people requested the early section, so I had to put a few people in the late session even though they requested the early one. So, if you're one of these people and have a serious need to switch to the earlier session, please let me know and I'll try to find someone to swap you with.
Yesterday I said to join the Blackboard Collaborate session First Day Class Meeting. Please disregard this and instead join the main Course Room session.
Also, here are a few problems we'll discuss in class today.
Our first class meeting will be tomorrow from 10:10am to 11:50am. You can join the class by logging on to Blackboard, clicking on Collaborate Ultra on the left-hand side of the page, and then joining the session First Day Class Meeting. I'll go over the logistics of the class and review a bit of material from Calculus I.
There's nothing you need to do right now other than show up, though you're also free to start watching the lecture videos, which you can find on the calendar. Each video is listed on the calendar on the day we will discuss it. That means that you have to watch them before we meet on that date. The first ones are due Monday, August 31st.
Welcome to Math 232, Calculus II. You can find some important information on the class in the syllabus. A more detailed schedule for the class is given in this calendar.
The class will include online homework through WebWork (see Homework). The textbook for the class is Calculus, Early Transcendentals, by Rogawski, Adams, and Franzosa. Any of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions are fine.
During this covid-19 semester, a lot of things are different. The first day of class is Wednesday, August 26th, and we'll meet starting at the official class time of 10:10am over Blackboard Collaborate (I'll email out a link, and you'll also see it within Blackboard). After this, on a normal class day, you'll be assigned either to meet from 10:10-11am or 11:10am-noon. In these sessions, we'll work on problems in groups, and then we'll discuss their solutions as well as other class material. I'll be posting video lectures that you'll be responsible for watching before class. I'll post the first one tomorrow (though you don't need to watch it until our meeting next Monday). You can find out more about the course in the syllabus, and I can answer your questions by email at tobias.johnson@csi.cuny.edu or in our meeting on Wednesday.