Dan Ellis :
ELEN E4810 :
DSP class tips
Here is some strategic advice on how to do well in my DSP class. This is based on my observations of which students come out best, and to some extent reflects my particular grading schemes. For fairness, I wanted to share these hints as widely as possible.
How to get a good grade in ELEN E4810 DSP
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Do all the homeworks. Even though each homework is only a few percent of
the final grade, the gap between an A and a B is also only a few percent.
Homeworks are easy marks, assuming you can find the time to do them, and
the zeros you get for skipped homeworks are difficult to recover by
other means.
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Pace yourself on tests. By an argument similar to the one for homeworks
above, completely skipping questions in the midterm or final is a very
costly strategy. The first few marks in a question are normally pretty
easy to pick up, so you should be careful to avoid the situation of getting
so bogged down in one question that you cannot even start one or more of
the other questions, leading to another hard-to-escape zero.
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Do an in-class presentation. My grading scheme allows for a small number
of bonus points to projects that make good in-class presentations. Again,
although this is not a hugely significant factor in itself, it's a safe
and controllable way to accumulate extra points, assuming of course you
have the time to prepare a reasonable presentation.
Of course, the single most important contributor to your grade is your
understanding of the material, as revealed by your performance in the exams,
homeworks and projects. You can't really substitute for this, so my main
advice is to keep up with the class, studying consistently throughout the
semester so that all the concepts and techniques make sense to you.
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Dan Ellis <[email protected]>