Eight Simple Rules for Doing My Homework

If you follow these rules, it will help me grade your homework more efficiently, and make me less likely to take off points because of grumpiness. It will also help you find your own mistakes and make your collected homework more useful in studying for tests.

If you don't follow these rules, I will first nag you about them. If you don't shape up, I will either take off points or ask you to rewrite your solutions and re-submit them.

1. Start Each Problem on a New Sheet

This makes it easier for me (and you) to find individual problems (especially if you put them in sequence! :-). It also allows me to return partial batches if I need more time to finish some of the problems.

2. Don't Be Stingy with Paper

Use more than one line for complex fractions. Don't try to cram complex equations onto a single line. Spread things out on the page (leave blank lines!) so I can read them easily, and have room to write comments.

3. Be Neat

Please don't make me hopscotch around the page trying to put together the pieces of your solution. Put them in logical order. I don't mind if you have to cross out a few things to correct them, but if you have a lot of corrections, you'd better write out a fresh copy.

4. Show and Explain Your Work

Show enough of your work so that I don't have to get out another sheet of paper and pencil and try to reconstruct intermediate steps or logic. Label key steps and state assumptions in English phrases or sentences.

5. First Do the Algebra, Then Do the Arithmetic

When you need to plug numbers into an equation to find the value of an unknown quantity, first rearrange the equation to isolate the unknown on one side, then substitute numbers for the known quantity and calculate the result. This makes it easier to check both the algebra and the arithmetic.

Similarly, if you have to use more than one equation, always try to combine them to get a single equation that has the final unknown all by itself on one side, then plug in the numbers. Only if the algebra gets really really messy should you break it up into two or more stages of calculation.

6. Don't Round Off Until the End

If you do all the algebra first, as described above, you should be able to calculate your final answer in one continuous chain of steps on your calculator without writing down any intermediate results. Write down the equation with all the numbers plugged in so I can check them, but don't write down the intermediate arithmetic steps.

If you do need to break the calculation into stages, keep a few extra digits in the intermediate results, to reduce roundoff error. Better yet, store the intermediate results in your calculator's memory and recall them when you continue.

7. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

If you can draw a diagram to illustrate how you're setting up the problem, do it. This might be a force diagram for a mechanics problem, a ray diagram for optics, etc.

8. Is That Your Final Answer?

Mark your final answer to the problem clearly by drawing a box around it. If you lay out your work in proper sequence, this should be at or near the end. Don't make me go on a scavenger hunt for it.