<p>srs question: do complaints about curves ever change a professor’s mind / judgment on grading?</p>
<p>if you got a 90 and ended up with a B+ you should definitely talk to auroux. I had him for 113 and he was very generous and reasonable with the grading.</p>
<p>So I got curved down also… </p>
<p>After dropping my lowest midterm, dropping my two lowest quizzes, and also counting my final as out of 150 (even though it really should be 145)… i end up with a 90.13% in the class. I think it’s ridiculous that I end up with a B+ with an raw grade of 90%… considering it should be a little higher than since my midterm score I counted as 84%… even though that was in the B+ range according to his midterm1 scaling. </p>
<p>I’m definitely gonna email him, unless someone has a better way of going about this. I’m just really ****ed off.</p>
<p>Anybody had any luck contacting the professor and asking him to change his mind? If so, what’s his reply?</p>
<p>Dunno . . but I was the ones that asked the two questions he answered on his website =P</p>
<p>On an unrelated note, Evans’ midterm was easy too (Pretty sure I aced it), so I guess that means maybe multivariable calc exams at top universities are made to be easy to just test a students remedial ability to apply the theorems and computations they learned into solving text-book-level problems in addition to solving a few trivial proofs.</p>
<p>PS: For anyone who’s taken Math 54, will be be of the same easiness/difficulty of Math 53, or will it be harder in your opinion?</p>
<p>^ i never took 53, but at least during our 54 final i felt you had to be pretty creative to be able to answer some of the problems</p>
<p>@Diivo not necessarily. you can check out past math finals on the berkeley math exam. None of them are crazy hard but many of them are much much tougher. I remember one of Auroux’s ‘extra’ problems were on one of the past finals.</p>
<p>My friends all said Math 54 was pretty tough (especially the diff eq part of the class)</p>
<p>I felt like Math 53 was an easier class. Honestly, if you did well in high school Calc, Math 53 isn’t that much harder. Math 54 on the other hand, is completely new to most people and is the gateway into more theoretical Mathematics.</p>
<p>Concretely, I aced Math 53 and I’m almost positive I won’t get an A in Math 54.</p>
<p>53 is just an extension of the plug and chug math you’re used to from math1a/1b. Math 54 is different because the linear algebra material requires more creative thinking to solve problems instead of using algebraic manipulation that you used in calculus courses. The differential equations material you learn in 54 is pretty straight forward though. The stuff on separation of variables with the fourier series is just a bunch of algebra.</p>
<p>This isn’t about math 53, but my cs61a grades just came out and it says I got a B even though on the course information sheet I scored in the B+ range which is a 253-268. My total points was 255.42 and I sent the professor and my TA an email about this but is there anything else I can do. I really hope they look into it, since the gpa difference between a B and a B+ is significant in calculating overall GPA</p>
<p>^nvm, Dr. Harvey replied to my email: “Yes, all the grades are wrong because of a software error – I just found out.
I’ll fix it!”</p>
<p>yay! I’m so happy!</p>
<p>Math 54 is significantly more theoretical. It really depends on the professor, but when I took it our second midterm had an average of 65, but I think the first midterm was around 90. The other professor had a test that ended up with an average around 90 though.</p>
<p>DifEQs are really straightforward. You just write down the equation for the solution on your cheat sheet, and then chug and plug. There is some space for the professor to ask about the theory behind them, but there’s really not a lot to ask based on the curriculum covered.</p>
<p>Linear Algebra, on the other hand, is very theoretical. Math 110 is all about the theory of linear algebra, and the proofs that go into it, and that material is fair game to 54 professors (they’re just limited by the fact that you’re still learning how to do linear algebra, and they only have 10 weeks to teach it to you).</p>
<p>There will be questions that require nothing more than simple matrix operations, but professors know that this is very rudimentary and almost everyone will get it right. So they try to include more theoretical stuff. For the first midterm there may not be much to do, but on the second midterm they can start including very abstract things that confuse many people, the prime example I can think of being the idea that a polynomial can be seen as a vector. It’s a strange idea, but when you think of it in this way, you can start to apply linear algebra to it. It just confuses many people, and that is what really can divide the class between those that get it and those that don’t.</p>
<p>They may also ask you to prove something simple. Since its only 54, and not 110, the proof will usually very closely mirror some proof shown in the book, or some proof that was to be done in the homework. Again, it comes down to who actually read the book or paid attention in lecture, and actually understood the proofs. But this requires much more creativity and a higher level of understanding than anything in Math 53.</p>
<p>^well said. That’s what I’ve heard from friends who have taken the course. I take it this Spring and can’t wait to learn! The applications of linear algebra sound interesting from what I’ve heard. (Lol I prolly sound like such a nerd)</p>
<p>You’re an EECS major. It’s expected to be nerdy and deeply interested/excited about school work :)</p>
<p>It’s expected to be nerdy and deeply interested/excited about school work</p>
<p>wat.</p>
<p>Either EECS majors are inanimate objects, of indeterminate sex, or bad with personal pronouns.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>lol, KevRus!!</p>