What Does the Syllabus Really Tell You? And How to Find Out What is Really Taught.

A reader looked at this year’s syllabus for the course that I wrote about in A Tale Out of School. The reader commented that there was nothing wrong with what this year’s syllabus covers.  Let’s look deeper and ask what covers means.

For those who have read A Tale Out of School,  you may have noted that no one asked me to change my syllabus.  They had a lot to say about what cover means.

The math chair and the Dean of Student Academic Integrity put it simply.

The math chair told me to make it a “cookbook” course.

The Engineering Dean – in a response to an email telling him that the students who had cheated on homework did poorly on the exam – wrote back, in part, that  “…math and science courses are crucial for student retention in engineering…” (The complete email is here.)

Most readers are not privy to behind-the-scenes discussions, or to standard understandings among faculty, but they can go to departmental webpages. Let’s use the particular case of the course in the above comment to see how to do that.

I will start with what everyone can do – no math knowledge needed.

Start by going to the course webpage.  Look at how the course is graded.  I’ve cut and pasted.  Here it is.

Update: The point grade for the course will be the greater of the following two options:

1. 20% homework/webwork + 20% E1 + 20% E2 + 20% E3 + 20% F
2. 100% F

Your point grade is then translated into the letter grade, with the class average being at least B.”

In this case you can get the averages for the exams, E1,…,F(inal). (Again, this is directly from the course webpage.)

 

Exam 1  Exam 1 Solution  Histogram Ave: 69.986, Median: 72

Exam 2 Exam 2 Solution  Histogram Ave: 71.069, Median: 72

Exam 3 Exam 3 Solution  Histogram Ave: 60.305, Median: 59

Table of Laplace Tranform

Final Final Solution  Ave: 55.825, Std Dev: 15.047

Note that there are links to the exams and their solutions.  If you, or someone you know, can read the exams, you can see what you really have to learn to make a B in the course.  In this case, you apparently just have to take the final and make 56, or probably  less, to make a B.

Sometimes, for example in history, or literature, or political science,  you can just look at the syllabus and tell that the students aren’t being challenged the way the should.  But in STEM courses, you usually have to dig much deeper.