Overall percentage scores for the course will be determined roughly as follows:
| 60% | Homework |
| 15% | Midterm exam |
| 25% | Final exam |
Homework assignments will not be not weighted equally because they are of different length and sophistication. Later assignments are likely to be weighted more heavily because they are more involved.
Furthermore, since many problems we will give out in the course have not been tried by students before, we feel the need to leave ourselves room to adjust these weights based on how students perform. If an assignment turns out to be much more difficult (or much easier) than expected, we would want to decrease the weight on that assignment relative to others.
As a consequence, the final weighting for each assignment will be chosen when the grades for that assignment are released. Likewise for the exams. Each student's overall percentage will then be a weighted average using the weights chosen in that manner rather than the fixed table of weights shown above (though we expect the weights we choose will be very close to what is in the table).
Overall percentage scores will be translated into course grades as described in the following table:
| 96.5% | 4.0 |
| 94.5% | 3.9 |
| 92.5% | 3.8 |
| 90.5% | 3.7 |
| 88.5% | 3.6 |
| 86.0% | 3.5 |
| 84.0% | 3.4 |
| 82.0% | 3.3 |
| 80.0% | 3.2 |
| 78.0% | 3.1 |
| 75.5% | 3.0 |
| 73.5% | 2.9 |
| 71.5% | 2.8 |
| 69.5% | 2.7 |
| 67.5% | 2.6 |
| 65.0% | 2.5 |
| 63.0% | 2.4 |
| 61.0% | 2.3 |
Grades for scores below 60% will be determined by the instructors on a case-by-case basis. (In particular, we reserve the right to pass students whose percentages would fall below 2.0 if we continued the table above.)
As an example, an average of 90% on the homework assignments and 80% on both the midterm and final exam would give an overall percentage score of 86.4%, using the tentative weights in the first table above. Per the second table, that translates to a 3.5 grade as it is above 86.0% and below 88.5%. In a similar manner, an average of 80% on the homework assignments and 70% on both the midterm and final would would translate to a 3.0 grade, while an average of 70% on the the homework assignments and 60% on both exams would translate to a 2.5 grade.