The course and homework policy for classes taught by Prof. Bewley are provided below. Please read this policy thoroughly to avoid any uncertainty as to my expectations. Violations of this policy will be taken seriously and dealt with accordingly.
Unless specifically instructed otherwise, students are not only allowed but strongly encouraged to discuss both the material of the class and homework assignments at length with their classmates; however, anything turned in, including all numerical codes, must be written completely individually. Do not provide your codes to other students, and do not put other students in the awkward position of asking for them, as such a request is itself a violation of this policy.
The UCSD Policy On Integrity of Scholarship is available here; it is assumed that all students in Prof. Bewley's courses are familiar with this policy and agree to abide by it. There will be zero tolerance for violations of this policy.
Prof. Bewley and his TAs schedule a lot of office hours each week when classes are in session, at times when you are unlikely to have other commitments.
Please get your class and homework related questions answered at office hours.
Unfortunately, we generally can not keep up with emails on course-related questions, so
most such emails are simply not going to be answered; instead of using email, it is much more efficient to address
course-releated questions in person (at office hours). [The one notable exception of this policy is book corrections: please do send book corrections to me via email, so I can stay organized with these corrections when editing the book further.]
Do not send the instructor or the course TA your homework writeup by email (unless previously arranged for in special circumstances, such as research-related conferences). Instead, turn in a printout of a succinct and organized report containing:
1) between a few paragraphs and a few of pages describing what you did to solve the problem (as necessary, you do not need to repeat anything that is already written in the text for the class or in the written problem description provided),
2) the core numerical solver you wrote to solve the problem, written and commented clearly and succinctly such that it is self-evident how it works,
3) output from a test code sufficient to illustrate that your solver works (you can copy text from the matlab window when your test code runs and paste this into your text editor in order to arrange this output in a readible fashion). Plots may either be incorporated into the text of the report (using, e.g., print -deps in Matlab to obtain a file that can be incorporated into document) or simply printed out one per page and included in the report, and
4) any appendicies you think are valuable (for example, the test code itself, etc.)
The guiding principle for preparing your homework writeup is that your writeup, written in your own words, together with the course materials written in mine (which you will hopefully keep), will describe to you completely how to solve the problems assigned five or ten years from now, when you might encounter a problem which is somehow related and refer back to your old homeworks.
As far as the codes themselves, generally, use only simple Matlab functions (for loops, if statements, function calls, and flops), as well as function calls to other codes in the Numerical Renaissance codebase, in your "production" code (that is, in your efficient numerical implementation of the algorithm under consideration); note that you are welcomed (and encouraged) to perform vector/vector and vector/submatrix multiplication in your production code, as done, e.g., in Gauss.m in Chapter 2. However, all sparse (e.g., tridiagonal) matrices should be stored in vectors containing their nontrivial components, not as big matrices filled mostly with zeros, in order to facilitate efficient scalability to very large problems.
In your test code, on the other hand, feel free to define and use matrices, and use whatever built-in functions in Matlab that you want in order to establish that your production code works correctly. In short, just follow the example set by the other codes in the book.
Midterm exams are in class (usually in the sixth week of the quarter); final exams are in the timeslot specified by the registrar.
I can not reschedule special make-up exams because students want to go home early for Thanksgiving Break, Winter Break, Spring Break, etc.
The course schedule is set by the university, and I am obliged to follow it. Please schedule your travels accordingly.
No calculators, phones, PDAs, or books are allowed in exams. One page of notes in your own handwriting (8.5" x 11", with writing on both sides ok) is allowed for the midterm, two pages of handwritten notes is allowed for the final. When arriving in the room for an exam, if at all possible, leave one empty chair between you and your neighbor on either side. When the exam is finished, we pick them all up sequentially in such a manner that we know who sat by whom; be advised that when we grade, the course TA(s) and I are always on the lookout for unexpected correlations.
