Syllabus — Fall 2026
By the end of the course,
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Homework (weekly problem sets) | 25% |
| Midterm 1 | 20% |
| Midterm 2 | 20% |
| Final Exam | 35% |
| Recitation attendance | up to 4% extra credit |
We will have 2 midterms and a final. Tentatively, Midterm 1 will be in class on October 12, and Midterm 2 will be in class on November 11. The midterms are worth 20% each, and the final is worth 35%.
Homework (problem sets) will be weekly, and worth a total of 25% of your grade. Your two lowest homeworks will be dropped. Homeworks will be due on Tuesdays at 11:59pm on Gradescope. Homeworks must be handwritten.
You are welcome to work on homework problems in study groups of two to five people; however, you must always write up the solutions on your own. Please indicate your collaborators on the first page of your homework.
I believe that you can tell between helping or hindering your peers' learning. Remember that most of the grade comes from exams, and the homeworks are designed such that learning through the homework is the best way to prepare for the exams. Giving your peers homework solutions may be setting them up for failure.
Recitations are optional, but strongly (strongly!) recommended. Attendance at recitation will be worth up to 4% extra credit on your final grade (attending all recitations = 4%, attending half = 2%, etc.). Recitation sections are all on Fridays — see the Recitations page for section times, locations, and sign-up information.
LLMs are fully able to do every homework problem we will have in this class. If you use AI to do the problem sets, we will not be able to detect it when grading, but you will do very poorly on the exams, which are a majority of the grade. With LLMs, it is very easy to mislead yourself into thinking you understand the content when you do not, and it is hard to recover from this down the line.
We will periodically include feedback forms as (free) points on the homework. Please give honest feedback! If something is going poorly for you, it is probably also going poorly for many others, and we want to be able to address it as well as we can. These forms will be anonymous, but if you have feedback you want to give directly please email us or come to OH.
Most course materials will be posted to this course website. Homeworks will be submitted on Gradescope. Lecture recordings will be posted to Courseworks.
We will not have an official textbook, but if you want one, I recommend these:
Please use the EdStem for all course-related questions (homework, exams, logistics, etc.). Nearly all questions should be public so that everyone can learn from them. Students are encouraged to respond to other students' questions! We will verify all student comments and answers, so don't be afraid to contribute.
A PDF version of this syllabus is available here.