When you assess...

...do you make an ass out of "e" and "ss"?

I dunno...it sounded good at the time.

I've just finished making up the first exam for 365.

It's a take-home exam with four questions on it (three of which are divided further into subquestions). There are some computations involved, but nothing too heinous, and nothing that can't be facilitated by the use of a calculator or Mathematica.

There are a number of applications considered, and though a couple of them are novel, they're clearly laid out, and quite simple. The other applications are similar to others considered in class. I think the exam will test interpretation of computations better than it will test anything else. So you know what the rank of a matrix is? Great! Now how do you use it?

I've also written up the plans for tomorrow's class, where we'll consider one more application, this one related to my research, before we play a game of "Choose Your Own Matrix" in order to flex our rank-finding muscles.

On deck for Monday: vector spaces! Fun! And on Wednesday, we might have some guest teachers...