A useful quote for students |
---|
"It's one thing about the playoffs," Jeter said. "Every opportunity, every time you're up there, you have a chance to do something. You can't change anything that happened up to this point." |
The exam will primarily concentrate on questions regarding material
from lectures 11 through 20 of the syllabus. The reason for the
phrasing "primarily concentrate" is that certainly some of the earlier
material in the course (for example, differentiation!) will be needed
to handle some of the questions in the exam. The course is quite
cumulative. The textbook sections whose contents are emphasized on
this exam are 3.8 through 3.11 and 4.1 through 4.9. This is a large
amount of material, including most of the applications of derivatives.
The exam is scheduled for 80 minutes, from 1:40 PM to 3 PM on
Thursday, November 19, in our usual lecture room. I will get to the
classroom early and am willing to start early.
From the course coordinator
The course coordinator will be the primary writer of the uniform Math
151 final exam, intended for all sections of Math 151 and to be taken
also by students in Math 153, so students
should have some familiarity with the style of these problems.
From the instructor
I will write the exam you will take so you should be familiar with my
"style".
The cover sheet for your exam will state:
No texts, notes, or calculators may be used on this exam other than the formula sheet supplied with this exam. Find exact values of standard functions such as e0 and sin(Π/2). Otherwise do NOT "simplify" your numerical answers! |
My old exam problems in relation to our syllabus
Here is a list of problems from those old exams "keyed" to each
section of the syllabus. This may be useful to you. Please be aware,
however, that with the increasing sophistication (!) of the course, a
number of problems actually require ideas and computations from
several sections.
Lecture | Sections | Topics | My exam problems |
---|---|---|---|
11 | 3.8 | Implicit differentiation | A1 B2 C3 |
12 | 3.9, 3.10 | Differentiation of inverse functions, exponentials, logarithms | There are no specific problems testing this material, but there are many problems which build on this section's contents (those problems needing derivatives of such inverse functions as ln, arctan, and arcsin, for example -- there are many such). |
13 | 3.11 | Related rates | A3 B3 C7 |
4 | 4.1, 4.8 | Linear approximations, Newton's method | A6 B4 C1 C2 |
15 | 4.2 | Maxima and minima, critical points | A2 B1 |
16 | 4.3, 4.4 | Shape of a graph, Mean Value Theorem, first derivative test, concavity | A4 A5 A8 B4 B7 B8 C1 C6 |
17 | 4.5 | Curve sketching, asymptotes | A4 A5 B7 |
18 | 4.6 | Maxima and minima problems | A2 B5 C5 |
19 | 4.7 | Indeterminate forms, L'Hôpital's rule | A7 B6 C8 |
My design criteria for calculus exams
I try to ask questions about most (hopefully all) important topics
which were covered in the period to be tested. I try to avoid asking
problems which require special "finicky" tricks, and do try to inquire
about techniques which are broadly applicable.
I want to give, on any calculus exam, questions which require reading and writing graphical information, reading and writing symbolic information, reading and writing quantitative information ("numbers"), and, finally, some question(s) requiring students to exhibit some reasoning and explanation, appropriate to the level of the course and also recognizing the limited time of an exam. I certainly don't always "hit" this target but that's my aim.
Maintained by greenfie@math.rutgers.edu and last modified 9/26/2009.