Homework Guidelines for ECE 6250
The application of learned principles, and practice, are essential to learning new material. An important part of an engineer’s training is to learn how to approach a problem logically and present the solution in a clear and coherent way. Accordingly, the following are guidelines that are aimed at improving the quality of homework submissions, facilitating learning, and helping the grader to quickly evaluate your submission.
Guidelines:
- All answers must be clearly indicated (boxed if appropriate). It should be easy to identify the answer to each problem at a glance.
- Use sufficient paper. Cramming lines together and writing small make your work difficult to decipher. Consider your answer to be a presentation of your thought processes and work—make it orderly, neat, visually appealing, and convincing.
- It is generally preferable to start each problem on a new page. Turn in the problems in order and stapled (not folded in the top corner).
- Be as brief as possible but no briefer. It is important to get to the heart of a problem and not cloud your submission with fluff. However, leaving out important steps or information is not acceptable. Practice brevity while maintaining completeness.
- Put your name in the upper right corner along with the date and class (ECE 6250). This information should appear on every page of your submission. You may also use a cover sheet.
- Keep your paper neat. Do not use paper with rough edges from being torn out of a notebook. Preferrably, write on only one side of your paper to avoid bleed-through.
- In order to facilitate more timely grading, we may occasionally only grade a random subset of the homework problems. You are encouraged to study the solutions for every problem and compare with your own.
- As stated in the syllabus, unauthorized use of previous semester course materials is strictly prohibited.
- You are encouraged to discuss the problems with other students in the class, but your solution must be prepared independently. You may not copy another student's work (or allow others to copy yours), and in preparing solutions to MATLAB problems, it is not acceptable to jointly write code with another student and then make only minor changes before submitting code which has been essentially copied. In order to avoid the appearance of inappropriate collusion, it is strongly advised that you always attempt to begin the problems on your own before discussing someone else's solution.