Semester and Final Exams



Exam Schedule
The schedule of examinations in Math 131 for Spring 2007 is as follows:

Exam Date Time
Exam I Monday, February 5 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Exam II Monday, March 5 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Exam III Thursday, April 12 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Final Friday, May 4 10:30 - 12:30


Note that alternate times for the final are not available, so all students must take it at the scheduled time.
Please plan your end-of-semester travel with this in mind:

A conflicting travel reservation is NOT a valid excuse for missing the final

Material to be covered on each exam will be announced in class. As you can see from the
lesson schedule a review will be held before each test.

Exam rooms will be assigned before each test. They can be looked up online at the
Math department homepage
or at:
Exam seat lookup


Exam Materials
You should bring the following equipment to each exam:
  • Your Washington U photo ID card
  • Several pencils (with erasers)
  • An approved calculator (see Course materials)
  • A 3x5 note card with any helpful notes you care to make.


Please do not bring:
  • Notes other than the 3x5 card
  • Scratch paper (there is plenty of room to write on the test booklet)
  • Unapproved calculators - again, see Course materials


Exam Details
When studying for the exams, you might find it helpful to visit the Math department online library of old tests
(some with, some without answers), located at: Old exam archive

Each semester exam will contain 15 multiple choice questions(each worth 5 points), whose answers you will mark on
an answer card for reading by a scanning machine. The remaining 25% of each test will consist of a free-response,
lovingly hand-graded question, for which partial credit will be given.

Results can be looked up at Online exam results, usually by the end of the next day, for the multiple choice
part of the test. Results of the hand-graded part will take longer - there will be about many papers to grade.

After the results are back, there will be a limited period of time during which you can look at the papers in
the Math office to raise questions about mismarked cards and similar issues. After the holding period they will be
returned in your discussion section.


Missed Exams
Legitimate excuses for missing an exam (verified illness, serious family emergencies, etc.) in all calculus courses
must be approved by Professor Blake Thornton, preferably in advance. Having one person approve excused absences
for all courses helps to guarantee that all students receive uniform treatment.

An unexcused absence results in a score of "0" on the exam in question.

If you are excused by Prof. Shapiro from one of the in-semester exams, you will not be given a make-up test.
Instead, the method of "multiple linear regression analysis" will be used to estimate your missing score. The
method is rather complicated (for details take one of our excellent courses in linear statistics), but it takes
into account your performance on the other three exams, and the class' performance as well. Hence you're not
penalized if the exam you missed was one on which everybody else had high scores.

Students who have an excused absence from the final will take a make-up test, usually early in the
next semester.