MapleTA guide for students

Prof. Andrew Ross

Fall Semester 2007

Getting set up

You will have to create an account for yourself; look for the "Register as a student in this class" link in the lower-right corner once you get there.

Please use ordinary upper/lower case for your name, e.g. use "John Q. Student" instead of "john student" or "JOHN STUDENT", and
Please use your official registration name rather than a nickname or second name.

Get the Answers First!

Many of the on-line questions are very similar to questions in the textbook. About half of the textbook questions have answers in the back (usually the odd-numbered ones). So, you can practice without being on-line.

Navigation, Etc.

Many students like to log in, print a copy, and then work on it offline:

solo, or
with friends, or
bring it to office hours, or
bring it to the Math Tutoring Center, or
bring it to class (if the deadline allows),

then later log in again and type in their answers.

There is a big difference between "Quit and Save" and "Grade":

ONLY USE "GRADE" WHEN YOU ARE 100 PERCENT DONE!
If you've done some work but want to take a break (e.g. for lunch, or to drive home) then use "Quit and Save".

There is a system time-out: if you are idle for too long, you will get logged off, and you may lose any work you've done on the current page. The timeout is sometimes as short as 12 minutes.

Assignment Policies

These are Prof. Ross's usual policies:

You may repeat the homework as many times as you like, up until the deadline (which is often right before class).
There's no duration limit (e.g. one hour) other than the deadline.
Your best score is what counts--others are ignored.

If he changes any of these, he will let you know.

Other Things

As in all computations, keep lots of decimal digits of precision as long as you can--don't round until the very end, if at all! Most of the time, you can give more precision than it asks for--if it says to give one decimal digit, you can give two or more.

Be sure you know what the question is asking for: hours, or minutes? percent, or decimal? While a human grader can give you the benefit of the doubt, the computerized grader isn't that smart.

Don't enter words like "miles" or "mph" or "percent" or the percent sign or the plus-minus sign; only use numbers in the answer boxes.

If it won't let you log in and e-mailing your password doesn't work, create a second account for yourself (call it "John2 Student2" or something) and do your work that way; also send me e-mail to alert me to the problem.

If you're composing a long essay-question response, write it in Notepad or SimpleText on your own computer, save it to a file, then copy-and-paste the text into the online system to avoid the timeout.

Start early! Give yourself time to do the assignment more than once. If the assignment is announced on Monday and is due Thursday, do it before class on Tuesday so you can ask questions during class.

The on-line system has weird ideas about formatting. It puts a comma into year numbers (e.g. 2007 becomes 2,007 or 1999 becomes 1,999). It might even switch to scientific notation sometimes. For example, 1E3 is 1*10^3=1000, or 1E1=1*10^1=10