PHYS 487 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Course Grading

Course grading will proceed in compliance with University policy as given in Article 3, Part 1 of the Student Code.

We use a holistic grading scale for all assignments/evaluations in the course, as follows:

100% for demonstrating full understanding of a problem (up to trivial mistakes)
80% for demonstrating good understanding, but with non-trivial mistakes
60% for demonstrating decent understanding, but with with significant gaps
40% for demonstrating a clear lacking in understanding and unproductive approaches to problem solving
20% for showing little to no understanding and no path to solution of a problem

Problem sets are posted on Tuesday before the end of the day.
Deadline for submitting solutions on Gradescope is the end of the following Tuesday (11:59:59pm).
Convert your homework into a good-quality and well-legible PDF and upload it there before the deadline (properly sorted by problem, please).
No late submissions. If you have an extraordinary workload in a week, please utilize a drop. For very good reasons (like being ill for several days) we may consider an EX. Please consult with Prof. Pfaff.
If you disagree with a grader's assessment you may request a regrade on gradescope. Regrades have to be submitted within 1 week after grades of an assignment were released.
Presentation matters -- your submission must convince the grader that your understood the material
For poor submission quality (not legible, pages not sorted, etc.), graders may grade your submission as a 0 and ask that you resubmit with better quality to get credit.
Working in groups is strongly encouraged, but you must submit your own work. Submitting copied work is plagiarism.
Grades and solutions are available one week after submission deadline.

Submission is on Gradescope, as separate problem sets
To submit, please convert your solved notebook, incl all relevant output, into a decent-looking PDF. See the bottom of the notebooks for help if you have trouble producing a good PDF file!
The computational problems are graded by two criteria: (1) is the code working, and (2) does it replicate the known physics well?
For full credit: Answer all questions, including the ones that ask for interpreting the physics! Full points are only given if your code clearly produces results that are in agreement with the expected physics.
For homeworks that have a computational and a non-computational part, the two parts each contribute half of the points for that homework.
Note: for computational exercises there's often not one single way to do it right; also, the results should only confirm physics that you already know. For that reason we do not publish 'correct' solutions for the computational parts.

Your final grade will be based upon the course components as follows:

Course Component	Number of Assignments	Percentage
Discussion sessions (2 lowest will be dropped)	11 (for participation; equally weighted. One of them is a numerical exercise and is optional.)	15%
Homework (3 lowest will be dropped)	12 (equally weighted)	25%
Midterm exams I and II	2 (equally weighted)	30%
Final Exam	1	30%
		100%

There are two ways for earning bonus points in the course.

Before the midterms we will release practice exams. If you turn them in for grading, you can get up to 2% credit for each practice exam (i.e., they are treated as extra, optional homework sets).
Around spring break, we will release an additional computational homework that is due at the end of the semester. It will be graded and is worth up to 6% credit.