Spring 2005 General Information
Teaching staff
The course lecturer is Prof. Daniel Jackson: no fixed office hours, but send email to arrange a chat (welcome, especially on technical matters), or just risk it and drop by. The teaching assistant is Robert Seater. He will hold office hours at times given on the website, and will also hold a quasi-recitation in which he'll meet with a group of students to discuss current topics and exercises.
Place and time
The course meets in 56-154 on Mondays and Wednesdays, from 11:00am to 12:30pm. See the calendar for a few exceptions.
TA office hours will be held from noon-2pm Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thursday will be traditional office hours held in 32-G707 (the Stata Center). Friday will be a quasi-recitation / group discussion held in 32-G725, a conference room just next to 32-G707. If these times don't work for you, feel free to set up an additional time by email. Office hours and quasi-recitation are both optional.
Course text
A textbook is under development for the course; students will receive draft chapters. A collection of short papers and book excerpts is available for download on the website.
Responsibilities and grades
Students are expected to: attend class and participate in class discussions; do weekly readings and provide short answers to reading questions; read the course text and provide helpful feedback; complete a series of problem sets, some of which consist of a series of small exercises, and some of which involve one or two more substantial modelling or analysis problems; undertake a small final project. The problem sets and the final project will be graded.
All work is to be done individually, without collaboration, except for the final project, which will be done in small teams, and in which all work will be shared, and for particular marked exercises, which can solved collaboratively but should be written up individually.
Grades will be determined as follows. A numerical value will be computed for each student based on written work, with a weighting of 80% for the problem sets and 20% for the final project. Students will then be ranked, and grade transitions will be chosen based on MIT guidelines. Each student's performance will then be reviewed informally, with class participation, answers to reading questions, and feedback on the course text taken into account. This may make the grade go up or down, especially for students near the transitions.
Handing in work
All work will be submitted electronically; see the submission guidelines. Students are welcome to draw diagrams and answer questions in long hand, and hand in scanned documents, but for models, accompanying source files are required.
Late work will not be accepted unless a prior arrangement has been made for a good reason.
Also see contact information and take a look at the in-class background survey.