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Grading Tips

As a class assistant or mentor, you will often have to grade homework. At the beginning of each semester, Lead will hold a grading session which covers some basic strategies for homework grading. If you are a class assistant, your TA often will have some way that they want homework graded. If not, here are some guidelines to help:
First of all, there is no predetermined way that you must grade homework. Everyone is free to develop their own style.

  • Encourage students to work in groups, and have each group submit only one homework.
  • Students should highlight their answer cells in a bright background (yellow, green, etc.) so that their answers are easy for you to find.
  • Grade more than one homework at a time. If you have two or three homework files tiled across the desktop, you can grade the same problem simultaneously on multiple homeworks. This also helps you to be more consistent.
  • Try to be as consistent as possible when grading. Occasionally, a TA will give you an answer key, but usually you are on your own.
  • Don't be lazy and get a huge build-up of ungraded homework files. A week turnaround on grading is pretty good.
  • If you are grading for your first time, then you should expect that it will go a little slowly at first. If you are having a lot of trouble, then talk to a Lead about getting some help.

Comments from Students

I am currently a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota in Geology and want to report the advantages that C&M DiffEq has given me. It turns out that describing the mathematics of deformation in rocks is simply the flow section of C&M Diffeq expanded to 3-D. If you can find the strain matrix of the rocks (matrix of the diffeq in C&M), you can get flow paths and watch how the rock deforms. Another one of my advisor's students had been working on this before I came and has developed the theory behind relating these flow paths to rock deformation. It was considered quite neat that I had actually learned how to do this as an undergrad in C&M. I am using the C&M DiffEq lessons to teach new geology grad students the mathematics behind our work.

— A graduate student in Geology on DiffEq & Mathematica

Tech Support

Techs support both the lab machines and the software used in this program.
In the event of a problem, send an e-mail to tech@cm.math.uiuc.edu.