On the term papers and graders' comments - please read

Particular remarks to those of you who did not get it approved:

• The "problem set" for the revision is precisely the same. You are required to submit a revised paper. (Submit a revised paper, not just a "patch".)
• Deadline: see previous message.
• Please take note of the following "submission-technical" remarks when resubmitting.

Submission-technical remarks:

• Some of you submitted multiple files rather than one single file.
  • For future submissions, this course or other courses:
    Please compile to a single PDF. 
  • The graders did assess your entire submission, despite only one file being ticked off as passed or failed. 
    For comments, look at that file which is ticked off. There should be comments on that one. (Most comments are in text, although at least one of them was for technical reasons commented in an uploaded PDF.)
• Cell phone cameras might awesome resolution, but that costs megabytes. (A black/white scan of less than hundred kilobytes per sheet would be more than enough!)
  We can handle a large file, but if you are on a slow line or use an online picture-to-pdf converter, you may for your own sake want to use a resize utility.
• Some of you submitted typeset papers. That is not recommended, it is too time-consuming, and it takes quite some skill to solve problems, to author and to typeset at the same time (trust me, I know).
  Spend your time on the content! (And as far as I know, none of the typeset papers were particularly nice-looking either - doing it properly would cost you even way more time. Write longhand. That is how the exam is done.)

Remarks on the graders' comments:

• The papers are only very roughly assessed, as the ambition is only pass/fail. (Rest assured that your exam committee will scrutinize in more detail.)
• Anything like "OK, but ..." means that what you have actually done is OK, but it does not mean it is a good answer - most often, you will have parts missing.
• Many remarks refer to a review. I (Nils) intend to review parts of it in class. See below.

Remarks on a couple of "common issues":

• Most of you made a particular division-by-zero mistake at a point. Ahem. That is not good.
• We did get quite a few strange answers on the convex functions proof by contradiction problem. As said in class, we expected that, as it is a bit awkward - but some of you do not formulate anything that looks like proof by contradiction, so I do worry that some of you do not even know what it is. 
  (On the other hand, if you just did your very best to argue why we cannot have two zeroes, and then found out you could as well submit it whether or not it is proof by contradiction, then at least it did not have negative value - though on an exam you may want to economize with your time budget.)
• Some of you do a lot of handwaving which has very little to do with mathematics really. You are not expected to employ a mathematician's level of precision, but you are supposed to actually do calculus (and linear algebra, when you get to that).
• For the exam: do not spend time repeating the problem or discussing it. Start solving.
  (If you want to restate the problem on top of your sheet for your own sake, in order to have an overview, then fine - but it is not asked for.)

There will be an in-class review.

• Maybe we will allocate extra time for it. I (Nils) will discuss with you after Easter.