Sample Project Evaluation

92.419 Introduction to Mathematica


Kenneth M. Levasseur
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell, MA 01852

So that you can avoid some of the pitfalls that a few of the former students in this course have encountered, I've put together a composite project evaluation. These are among the comments that I've made on projects that have earned grades of B or less. Since this is a composite, the comments might not be totally consistant. I would welcome any suggestions using the link below.


Project Evaluation

Name: _____________________

Project: ________________________

Clarity and Appearence:

  • The project was fairly clear and interesting but contained several spelling and grammar errors that detracted from the presentation.
  • Use of Mathematica: A limited number of Mathematica features were used.
  • Instead repeating expressions such as
  • You didn't use cell formatting to arrange the your project in outlineform.
  • You had text in an Input cell instead of a Text (or other nonactive type) Cell.
  • Mathematical Content:

  • The mathematical results in the primary reference could have been more clearly explained.
  • Results from the paper could have been highlighted and illustrated with more clarity.
  • Once you developed the code to implement the algorithm you should have tried more cases than the few that appeared in your reference. You might have gotten further insight into the situation and extended the results in the paper.
  • You failed to consider special cases of the problem. Your code didn't work for those cases.
  • After having Mathematica compute many case, you didn't synthesize the results. (Doing a lot of calculations without doing something with them is as bad as not doing the calculations at all.)
  • Other Comments:

  • Your grade for the course reflects the fact that I had very little to go on other than the project. You should have turned in more solutions to exercises.
  • On balance I enjoyed reading it, but more work on the tutorials and their exercises would have probably helped you develop the project further.
  • Grade for the project: ___ - With all of these negative comments, I wouldn't want to think about the grade. Don't worry, I haven't given a project grade under BC, so I'm sure you'll be fine if you have the prerequisities and you do a reasonable amount of work.

    Grade for the course :___


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