CAS LX 522 F08

Ok, that’s that then. I’ve now submitted the grades and posted everything that I have to the Blackboard site. Your grades should be visible now through the Student Link.

I will be posting the key to the final on the syllabus page shortly, if you want to have a look, and you can pick up your actual final from me next semester if you wish.

Every year, I re-realize that as you are handing in your finals is not a very effective time to bid you all farewell. But, still, thanks for a good semester, and have a good break. I’ll see some of you in classes next semester or beyond, but even if you’re not in a class with me, stop by and say hello!

And now, on with the break..!

If you happen to be one of the first couple of people to leave the final, I realized that I forgot to give you back your homework. You can pick it up later, or stop by my office sometime during the day today. Or, you know, pick it up next semester.

I was just reminded that in all the excitement, I forgot to post the key to homework 10. Sorry about that. It is now linked in on the syllabus page as well as in the first sentence of this post.

As we head into finals period, let me reiterate here what I mentioned in class: Tue-Thu next week are “office days”, more or less. I won’t have specific office hours, but I should be around for most of all three days, and I can also answer emailed questions (and perhaps post some of the answers here).

Odds are good that you’ll find me in my office if you just drop by, but better would be to email me in advance and actually set a time.

Hi everyone. Ok, here’s the deal with the extra credit homework (trees are easy to draw).

The entire homework is relatively elaborate and it’s a bit more “thinky” than pretty much any of the homeworks so far. It’s not so much to practice doing things, but to think your way through the problem. You’ll notice that the instructions are practically a small paper, and you have to read it pretty thoroughly. So, I expect it will take you a while to do the whole thing.

There’s a sense in which it would be sad to do just part of it, because the aim of the project is to come up with a tree for Trees are easy to draw, but this involves seeing why it is difficult and dealing with the problems that arise. So, the extra credit homework takes you through step by step, trying to bring the problems up and having you identify them. So, if you stop partway through, you won’t have whatever satisfaction there might be in getting to the actual answer.

However, time is also finite, and so I do want to make it possible to do as much as you have time for (or as much as you can before getting stuck, if you do) and still get credit for having done so when you turn it in. So, what I will do is this:

Points from the extra credit assignment (there are 43) will augment your second-lowest homework score, and can augment your third-lowest homework score by up to 8. My rationale for this is that the idea is that this is supposed to be a replacement for the second-lowest score, but I want it to be possible to do less than the whole thing. What this does mean, however, is that if your second- and third-lowest scores are 30s, then you only need to collect 10 points from this extra credit homework before you hit the ceiling, with both of those two counting as 35s. You have more to gain from this if you have a couple of relatively low scores among your homework scores.

Also, as promised before, if you did the BUCLD writeups, this redundantly covers the second-lowest homework score, so if you wrote up two talks well, there are only 8 points available from this extra credit assignment to apply to the third-lowest homework score.

It’s a bit complex, but at least now I hope it is well-defined. For any homework that I still have left to grade, I’ll try to get the points up on the Blackboard site very soon.

If you’re interested in this level of detail, here’s how I will break down the points:

Task 1: [4] Constituency tests
Task 2: [2] Short answer about constituency
Task 3: [6] Finish tree for it is easy for me to draw trees
Task 4: [1] Draw case assignment arrows
Task 5: [2] Short answer about idioms
Task 6: [5] Shortish answer about binding
Task 7: [4] Short answer identifying a wh-island violation
Task 8: [3] Draw tree for John’s book
Task 9: [1] Draw case arrow
Task 10: [3] Draw tree for book’s SELF
Task 11: [1] Identify unchecked feature that crashes one derivation
Task 12: [3] Shortish answer about wh-islands
Task 13: [8] Draw the tree for trees are easy to draw

Good luck with studying and with finals.

I’ve now posted pretty much everything (except the key to homework 10) on the syllabus page.

This includes the keys to all previous homeworks, the second part of the summary notes, and practice finals. Because there are only two classes left in the semester, you might want to start taking a look at the summary notes and practice finals soon. The last class will be reserved for discussing questions you may have.

The practice finals work just like the practice midterms did. These are the actual finals I gave in three previous classes, and then the keys that go with them. So, they are realistic. If you feel comfortable with them, you should not have a problem with the actual final. A good way to study would be to try to take one of the finals, see how you did, work out what you still need to review, and then do it again on one of the other practice finals.

Thinking about homework 6 some more, a couple of things:

First, concerning the features of elect, there was supposed to be a [uN*] feature there. I have posted an updated key to reflect this (but you should mark your paper copy). I will record a score 1 point higher for everyone across the board, because the informal polling suggested that it was pretty much universally marked off.

Second, homework 6 was simply too short, and I don’t think holding it to the 35-point scale that the previous homeworks were on makes much sense. I will therefore cut it in half, making it worth 17.5 points.

So, to summarize: To get your actual score, take the number written on your homework, add one, divide by two, and consider it to be out of 17.5.

When I do the computation at the end, homework 6 will only be dropped (if it has the lowest percentage score) where the outcome is better than dropping the second-lowest, since homework 6 is now worth less.

I’ve finally gotten through working out the mid-semester grade estimates, and I’ve added them to the Blackboard site for the course. You should see a column called “MidSem”, which contains a number on a 4-point scale. The idea is that anything above 3.67 is an A, above 3.33 is an A-, above 3.00 is a B+, and so forth.

I computed these based on the assumption that there were only 5 assignments (one score dropped), and that the score on the final is the same as that on the midterm.

I will post information about the BUCLD extra credit assignment within a couple of days, which is something you can do to substitute in for the next lowest homework score.

Also: please double-check that there isn’t something unexpected there, e.g., a homework you gave me that didn’t get recorded, or a typo in a score.

Ok, sorry to have been slow making this available, but this is how I would line up the points on the midterm to letter grades. Note too that I pushed it up a little bit in order to exclude (2e).

47–50 = A, 43–46 = A−,
39–42 = B+, 35–38 = B, 31–34 = B−,
27–30 = C+, 23–26 = C, 19–22 = C−.

This is perhaps better than you might have anticipated, if you think of 60% as the cutoff for passing—but it’s far too difficult to try to design a test that is exactly the right difficulty level to make the percentages line up that way. The scaling I give above pretty well reflects the actual nature of the test I think.

As for how you are doing overall at this point, I’ll try to work up a kind of midterm estimate within a day or two. You can kind of figure it out based on the scale above, dropping a homework, etc., though the scale for the midterm and the scale for the homework will be slightly different to reflect their differences in difficulty. So, soon, on that. I’ll make it a visible column on the Blackboard site when it is ready.

Monday is a holiday, and then Tuesday is a “Monday.” I don’t generally have office hours on Mondays and I won’t be having office hours on Tuesday as a result (also, I’ll be out of town).

Feel free to email me questions you have about the midterm, though, in the meantime. And I’ll try to be relatively available on Wednesday, so if you want to just schedule a time to come in and talk then, it should be possible to work something out.