Math 125: Calculus 1 (39468 D) (Prof. Ricardo Mancera)
Office hours in the final week: 10-12 and 1-2 pm on Monday (Dec 5)
Discussion notes:
Ivan’s Week 15 Review Session (Solutions to Fall 2020, Spring 2020, and Fall 2019 Finals)
Final Exam Review: All Red Problems (Week 11~15) Solutions to them
(including solutions to some tricky non-red HW problems)
Discussion Notes on Midterm II Review (Nov 24, Thursday)
Solutions to Mancera’s Optimization Problems (Nov 17, Thursday)
Midterm II Grading Rubrics (Nov 9, Wednesday)
Midterm II Review: All Red Problems (Week 7~10) Solutions to them
(including solutions to some tricky non-red HW problems)
Tips on How to Prepare for Calculus (Math 125) Exams (Oct 30, Sunday)
Midterm Grading Rubrics (Oct 15, Saturday)
Quiz 7 Solutions (Oct 13, Thursday)
Discussion Notes on the Midterm Review (Sep 29, Thursday)
Midterm I Review: All Red Problems (Week 1~6) Solutions to them
Additional course resources:
All past final exams since 2001: https://dornsife.usc.edu/mathcenter/125/
Course schedule (composed by Prof. Mancera)
Exercise list (composed by Prof. Mancera)
Textbook: Essential Calculus (2nd edition) by Stewart (Click here for the pdf file)
Discussion time: 12:00—12:50 pm on Tue, Thu (39469 R)
1:00—1:50 pm on Tue, Thu (39470 R)
Office hours: 5-6 pm on Monday
3-4 pm on Tuesday
4-5 pm on Wednesday*
and by appointment**
*For this hour, I usually arrive at the Math Center at 3:40 pm so you may come 20 minutes in advance if you have any questions.
**Feel free to schedule an appointment with me outside of my regular office hours! We can either do it in the Math Center physically or in my personal zoom room online. Send me an email so we can set up a time, and then I’ll send you my zoom link. Click here to see my weekly schedule.
Locations: KAP 140 (Discussions)
Math Center [KAP 263] and Zoom (Office hours)
If you want to join my office hours by Zoom, click here. The Math Center Assistant on duty will assign you to my breakout room.
Note I: As a rule of the Math Center, TAs are there for *all* students (not just their own students) when holding office hours. So you can go there anytime to do homework or get help from any TAs. And I will surely be there at least during my office hours. You can check out here the Math Center Schedules including all TAs’ office hours this semester.
Note II: The Math Center is run on a drop-in basis without appointments. Thus, if many students show up during my office hours, I’ll try to let you ask one question at a time in order of arrival (unless you have to leave soon) and then continue the cycle, to ensure everyone there has a chance to discuss questions with me instead of waiting for nothing. Feel free to give me any feedback!
Email responding: Ignoring other people’s emails is super annoying and frustrating, so I NEVER do that. When you send me an email before 10 pm, I’ll definitely be able to respond to you the same day, usually within 2 hours. (I might have to reply next morning to emails received after 10). In particular, you can expect me to get back to you within 5 minutes if you email me before 11 am on Tue & Thu mornings (when I’m usually preparing for your following discussions). In case I didn’t make it the same day, most likely it was because I didn’t see your email somehow, so you may resend the same email to remind me.
Syllabus quiz rule: There is a weekly quiz lasting 15~20 minutes long each Tuesday in our discussion. During the quiz, I’d start a timer and project it on the classroom screen so you could always see how much time is left. After the time is up, you will have 5 minutes to scan your solutions as a pdf file and upload them to your Gradescope. According to the syllabus, we should not use calculators or smartphones during quizzes. Hence, even if you have finished all quiz problems early (before the timer stops), please still wait until the 5-minute slot to start scanning and uploading.
Quiz grading and make-ups: I usually finish grading and publish scores on Gradescope by Saturday night. I’ll then sync the scores to Blackboard on Sunday night. The time in between is given to you to email me questioning my grading rubrics, and I’ll make necessary changes based on your feedback. According to Prof. Mancera, we can make up missed quizzes provided that this is not a recurrent thing. So if you have to make them up, you can either come to any of my office hours in the Math Center or schedule a time (e.g., 7:30—7:50 pm) to join my personal zoom room with your camera on. I’ve published my weekly schedule here for your reference. I recommend you finish make-ups by Thursday noon the same week since I usually give quiz solutions and go over some problems in Thursday’s discussions. Otherwise, we’ll have to compose a different version of the quiz (with the same number of problems covering the same topics).
Grader: JuAn Lee (juanlee@usc.edu)
Homework grading guidelines (which were composed by JuAn and I copied them here, so the copyright belongs to the grader JuAn):
“1. As long as the steps are coherent (no large logical reaches or jumps) and the answer is correct, I will not mark any points off
2. I don’t plan to dock off points for small syntax error unless it is fundamentally flawed
3. I plan to grade more heavily toward the work involved in getting the solution, so as long as you have coherent work, you won’t get marked off by too much
If you have any regrade requests, make sure to do so as I am open to suggestions and corrections.”