Exam Information for Math 126

As it says on the course syllabus, there are two midterms and a final in MAT126, which count for 25%, 25%, and 35% of your grade, respectively. No Make-up exams will be given. If you miss an exam due to a documented medical or family reason, that score will be replaced by the grade on the balance of the course. If you miss more than one exam for such reasons, you should probably withdraw from the course.

First Midterm: 8:30 pm on Thursday, September 29, 2016

Bring a photo ID. No calculators will be allowed. Bring a pen to the exam: while you may do the midterm in pencil (or crayon), you can only contest grading of problems done in non-erasable ink. Sorry.

The midterm focuses on material in the first half of Chapter 5 of the text (through 5.6); that is, you should understand the definite integral as a limit of Riemann sums, as well as be able to evaluate them using the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, be familiar with using the technique of substitution, and be able to do a simple integration by parts.
Doing all of the homework problems prior to the exam is a very good idea. Doing additional problems from the text can be helpful.

There are one and a half review sessions from last spring you can watch on video: Subsitution and review and More review. Although this was last spring, the material covered is pretty much the same.

You should make sure that you know the antiderivatives of all the basic functions that you learned in first-semester calculus. You should know all the antiderivatives on this table of integrals (and, of course, how to use them).

You should be able to do the problems on the exams from previous semesters that you see below. The coverage varies somewhat, since the exam falls at different places in different semesters. Note that our exam will have different problems, in possibly different formats, from any of these old exams. Still, they should give you an idea of the range and difficulty to expect. Note that our exam is a few days later in the semester than any of the sample exams below; this means we have covered integration by parts, but the sample exams have not. You are responsible for integration by parts, but it won't be a major emphasis on the exam.

Results: Below is a graph of the score distribution on the exam. While this was not a terribly difficult exam (easier than most of the homework problems), a lot of people got grades of C- or lower.

low score: 0 mean: 36.4 median: 37 high score: 71 possible score: 71

range letter grade 55-71 A-, A 40-54 B-, B, B+ 30-39 C, C+ 20-29 C- 10-19 D, D+ 0-9 F

If you got less than 30 on the exam, you really need to reconsider your approach to this course. If you haven't already taken MAT125, you should seriously consider moving down to it; this can be done with this form.

There were three different versions of the exam, called Clotho (solutions), Atropos (solutions), and Lachesis (solutions). You get to figure out why they have these names. If you see any typos in the solutions, please let me know.

Second Midterm: 8:30 pm on Thursday, November 3, 2016

The second midterm will cover all the material we have covered since the first exam: the rest of Chapter 5 (on various techniques of integration, as well as numerical integration (ie, Midpoint, Trapezoid, and Simpson's rules) and improper integrals; also area between curves and volumes from chapter 6.

In order to help you review and prepare, David Kahn has kindly allowed us to use some chapters from his AP Calculus book:

You can watch a video of a review session from spring 2016. This doesn't include all the material we've done, but will probably be helpful anyway.

Here are some old exams (or sample problems) from previous semesters to help you prepare. Some of these occured a bit earlier in the semester than ours did, so some of the later material may be missing. In other cases, some of the earlier material may be missing.

Results: Below is a graph of the score distribution on the exam.

low score: 0 mean: 76 median: 71 high score: 176 possible score: 180

range letter grade 125-180 A-, A 75-124 B-, B, B+ 45-74 C, C+ 30-44 C- 15-29 D, D+ 0-14 F

As before, there were three versions of the exam. Venkman (solutions), Ray (solutions), or Egon (solutions).

Homeworks

Strictly speaking, homeworks don't belong here, but I don't know where else to put this information.

A small part of your grade corresponds to the paper homeworks and webassign scores. However, there is a strong correspondence between homework grades and how people do on the midterms and the final, although it only goes one way. Very few people who do well on the midterms are doing poorly on the homeworks, but quite a few people do well on the homeworks but not on the midterms. Most people, however, do about the same on both.

Here is a graph of how people are doing on homeworks, as of Thu, 8 Dec 2016. From this, you can see that there is a group of people who just don't do homework much. Not surprisingly, these correspond closely to the group that is getting terrible grades on the exams. (However, there are also lot more grades of A on homework than people getting an A in the class.)

On the right is a graph showing how the homework scores (x-axis) correspond to the overall grade in the class. Even though homeork only makes up a small part of the overall grade, you can see how the homework grade corresponds to high exam grades: no one with an A or A- (blue) has below about 70% on the homeworks, and nearly all of the D/F grades have less than 40% on the homework. There are a couple of people in the C/C- range who did almost no homework, and one person with about 80% on homework who has a D average, but the correspondence is rather clear.

Final Exam: 2:15pm on Wednesday, Dec 14, 2016

The final will be cumulative, covering everything that we have done in the class.

Here are a few more chapters from David Kahn's AP Calculus book, in case you want to use them.

Here are some finals (or sample finals) from previous years to help you study. Be aware that some of the applications of integration covered in MAT126 differ from semester to semester. For example, only one of the samples here does polar coordinates and complex numbers, some cover center of mass/centroid (which we didn't do), and only one does probability. Also, while most of the volume problems are for surfaces of revolution, note that you (should) know how to compute volume if you know a formula for the area of a cross-section, as in the paper homeworks Bldg, Wax and problem 4 of the second midterm. Don't memorize formulae-- understand them!
Please work the problems before reading the solutions, or they won't do you any good.

If you want to watch a video, a review class from May 2, 2016 and another from May 4 may help you prepare for the final. While they are from last spring, the material is pretty much the same. Remember that there are videos of all the material for the class on the class schedule page.

Exam Locations:
The finalwill be in a variety of rooms, depending on which recitation you are in. Note that some rooms have changed yet again! Check carefully!

Room	Recitations	lecturer(s)
Earth&Space 001	Thomas Rico (R02, R30), Mariangela Ferraro (R03, R33),	Scott Sutherland   Lec 01 (R02, R03 only), Zhiqiang Li   Lec 03 (R30, R33 only)
Frey 102	Rayne Goldberg (R01, R32) Gaurish Telang (R04, R05)	Scott Sutherland   Lec 01 (R04, R05 only), Zhiqiang Li   Lec 03 (R32 only)
Harriman 137	Alaa Abd-El-Hafez (R20, R21) Frederik Benirschke (R22,R23)	Jozef Bodnár   Lec 02 (all sections)
Javits 103	John Sheridan (R31) Aleksei Golota (R34)	Zhiqiang Li   Lec 03 (R31, R32 only)