This week we are starting with a
homework program. You are probably viewing
this video because you received from me
a special assignment that I asked you
to hand me back
within one week. I will not be grading
this assignment. There are far too many
students in this course for me to be
able to do this. Your peer students will
be grading you. And so it's a legitimate
question to be asking yourself: "If the
teacher is not grading me but my peer
students are reading me, then how do I
make sure that I get maximum points for
my answer?"  The answer to this is that
to get a good grade for your homework
program, you have to treat your readers
like they are your colleagues at work.
Your colleagues, you're not trying to
impress them with how incredibly good
you are, you are trying to be efficient
with their time, and be respectful and
thankful for the time they spend
checking your work and helping you
progress through your work. The same
thing applies with your peer students in
this assignment. Let me show you what not to
do, and then what to do, for this kind of
assignment, so you get good grades. Your
colleagues
they are looking for three things.
Because that's the way you're going to
be graded:
the first thing they are looking for is
the general answer to the equation, erm,
to the question. So one equation that has
*no number* in it, only the symbols that
are put in the assignment. This is the
first thing you're looking for. Second
thing they are looking for is the
correct numbers inserted in this
equation. And the third thing they
want to see is a sensible final result
with the correct unit. They're looking
for this, because these are the three
rubrics in which you will fill in how
many points you earn for your answer. And
so to maximize your points, give them
exactly that. Give them a very easy way
to quickly find where the general answer
to the question is,  where you put the
numbers into it, and where your final
result is and what the units for
that answer are. Let me show you examples
of what not to do.
This is very messy. This is hard to read,
is it very dirty,
there are things crossed over. You're not
too sure if it's a plus, a minus, if it's not
anything at all, it's just a zero before
the first number. There's a finger left
over. This says overall to the reader "I
don't really care about your work." "You're
just gonna grade me very quickly and I'm
not careful with your time". This is
somebody who was more careful obviously
much better with the scanning and the
presentation but has a lot of trouble
with organizing their equations. You're not too sure exactly what they're
equating here, and they're not very good
with symbols. So you are left, if you are
looking for a problem in here, you're
left wondering whether this is a plus or
minus. If something is wrong and you're
trying to find where the error came from,
then where do you go from symbol to
symbol, and where does this change, what
is this equal to? So this is a bit messy.
And try not to do that. This is somebody
who wrote very well, but has a lot of
difficulties with the spatial
organization of their paper. And so there
are things everywhere. It goes from right
to left, top to bottom, you have to follow
the arrows, it's a huge patchwork of
things that makes it, even though it may
be correct, makes it very difficult to
debug one once there is a problem. This
is somebody who forgot to turn the light
on. And even though they wrote very well,
have a very nice equation layout, they
forgot to turn the light on as they were
scanning the document, and you get a very dark,
very blurry picture to look at. This is
the perfect answer.
This is somebody who spent hours and
hours and hours working out something very
very nice on the tablet, digitized
everything, colored everything, and it's
beautiful and it's nice and it's easy to
grade. And you don't need to do that! This
is great if you do this, perfect, good for
you, but you don't have to invest that
kind of time to get good grades. Let me
show you the paper of somebody who makes
your life easy as a peer grader, and as a
colleague. It looks like this. It's not
perfect, but it's easy to debug. And in
this page immediately you find out what
the symbols are here, what the numbers
are,
most importantly, what the general answer
to the problem is, and what the numbers
in the end are, yeah? So if you zoom into here,
you quickly have, very quickly have
identified whether the general answer is
correct or not, because you can compare
it with a final answer. You quickly see
which numbers have been put in there, and
you quickly see here what the final
result, and with which unit it is written here.
That came up paper like so is very
easy to grade. Even if this is wrong, this
will facilitate the work of the peers,
because it will make it easy for them to
find the three things that they are looking
for, which are: the general answer to the
question, the correct numbers inserted in
this equation, and then a sensible final
result with a correct unit. Three things
that you want to give your peers so they
can give you points, stop and go back to
what they were doing
otherwise, and spend their time with
something else. So here it is. Good luck,
and I'll see you soon.
