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\centerline{Mathematics 135, section 1 -- Calculus 1}
\centerline{Information on Final Examination}
\centerline{December 9, 2019}
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{\it General Information}
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\item{$\bullet$}  The final examination for this class will be
given during the scheduled period 8:00am to 10:30am on Saturday, December 21.
\item{$\bullet$}  Like the midterms, this one will be given
{\it in our regular classroom}, Swords 359 (where our class has met).
\item{$\bullet$}  The final will be similar in format to the 
midterm exams but perhaps 2 times as long.  I expect that
if you are well prepared and you work steadily, then you should 
be able to finish the exam in about 1.75 hours.  However, you will have 
the full 2.5 hour period to work on the exam if you need that 
much time.
\item{$\bullet$}  As on the midterms, you may use a graphing calculator.
\item{$\bullet$}  No cell-phones, computers, or other electronic
devices beyond a basic calculator may be used during the exam.  Please do not bring them
with you; they will be subject to confiscation for the period
of the exam if you use them. 
\item{$\bullet$} We'll be reviewing for the final during the last week of classes.
\item{$\bullet$} I will let you know about my final exam week office hours
when I figure out when those will be.  
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{\it Topics to be Covered}
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\item{$\bullet$}  This will be a {\it comprehensive} final -- 
it will cover all the topics we have studied this semester,
with about 30\% each devoted to the material on the first two midterm exams
and about 40\% devoted to the material on the third.  
\item{$\bullet$}  See the review sheets for the midterms
for a detailed breakdown of the topics we studied earlier.
Those review sheets are now reposted on the course homepage
if you need another copy of any of them.
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\noindent
{\it Philosophical Comments and Suggestions on How to Prepare}
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\item{$\bullet$}  The reason we give final exams  
in almost all mathematics classes is to encourage students
to ``put whole courses together'' in their minds. 
Also, preparing for the final should help to 
make the ideas ``stick'' so you will have the material at your 
disposal to use in later courses.  {\it This is especially 
important if you are preparing to continue to MATH 136 -- everything
we will do there is based on material from this semester's course and 
it will be difficult or impossible to do well in that course unless
you have the material from this one under good control.}
\item{$\bullet$}  It may not be necessary to say this, but
here goes anyway:  {\it You should take this exam seriously} -- 
it is worth $25\%$ of your course average and it can 
pull your course grade up {\it or down} depending on how you do.  
\item{$\bullet$}  Get started reviewing early
and do some work on this {\it every day} between now 
and the date of the final.  Don't try to ``cram'' at the end.  
There's too much stuff that you need to know to approach 
preparing that way!
\item{$\bullet$}  Review videos and your class notes in addition to the
text, especially for topics where you lost points on the midterms.  
There are a lot of worked-out examples and discussions of all of 
the topics we have covered there.
\item{$\bullet$}  
Look over the midterm exams with the solutions. Go over your corrected problem sets.
If there were questions where you lost a lot 
of points, be sure you understand why what you did was not
correct, and how to solve those questions. 
\item{$\bullet$}  Be sure you actually do 
enough practice problems so that you have the 
facility to solve exam-type questions in a limited
amount of time.   {\it Even if you 
have saved solutions for practice problems from the midterms},
it is going to be much more beneficial to do practice problems
starting ``from scratch'' rather than just reading old
solutions.  Remember, the goal of the course is to get
you to be able to develop solutions to these problems
yourselves, not just to understand solutions that someone
else (that includes you, one or more months ago!) has written down.  
Another analogy -- as most of you know from your study
of languages, it's much easier to understand 
another language passively than it is to actually 
use a language actively yourself (for instance, to form your
own complete, grammatically correct sentences).  
The goal of this course is to make you reasonably
proficient ``calculus speakers'' and there's no substitute
for active practice on those skills.
\bye
  
