Math 242C (Prof. Hildebrand), Fall 2006
Honors Credit for James Scholars

Applying for Honors Credit

If you are a James Scholar, you can satisfy the James Scholar Honors Credit requirement with this class (Math 242). The first step is to fill out an application, called Honors Credit Learning Agreement (HCLA). The deadlines and application procedures vary by college. In LAS you can do the application online, in Engineering you have to fill out a paper form, and have that signed by me. For more information see the following websites:

Honors Credit Work and Course Grade: Note that doing an honors credit project has no effect on your course grade; it only serves to satisfy the James Scholar Honors Credit requirement. The course grade for James Scholars is assigned in exactly the same way as for everyone else, and based entirely on the scores on quizzes, midterm exams, and the final, as outlined in the Course Information Sheet; there is no provision for improving a course grade by doing extra projects.

Honors Credit Projects

List of projects. Click on this link for a list of 6 projects, of which you should pick 5 (i.e., you can omit one of the projects). One project is from the Edwards/Penney text, and the others from the Stewart Calculus text. Most of the Stewart projects are self-contained, and you don't need the Stewart text to do these projects. The only exception is the project on Kepler's Laws, which references notation from a section in the Stewart text. This section is not available online, but I can give you hard copies of it.

What you need to do: Most of the projects are formulated in the form of multi-part problems that serve as step-by-step guide to the solution. You should first solve (on scratch paper) these subproblems (this is not too hard since each such subproblem usually involves only a single step), then put these solutions together and arrange them into a coherent write-up, with some prose added as needed. The write-up should be self-contained, i.e., one should be able to follow it without having to refer to the statement of the project. It should be attractively presented (ideally using some type of wordprocessing program, though a neatly handwritten version will also do), and it should be in grammatical English. The presentation is a key part of these assignment, and you should put some serious effort into it. It should be something you can be proud of, and you would not be embarrassed to show a potential employer! (I should say that this has not been a significant problem in past years. Nearly all James Scholar projects I had taken on in the past ended up being more than satisfactory in terms of their presentation, and many were quite impressive.)

Deadlines

Application deadlines: Each college has its own deadlines for submitting applications. Make sure that you don't miss the college deadline. (Note that LAS has a particularly early deadline - around early October - and they are strict in enforcing the deadline.)

Deadlines for the project:

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