Dear ASTR220 students, I am sorry to inform you that your Professor, Andrew Wilson, is too ill to continue teaching ASTR220. I have agreed to take over the class and met most of you this morning. Please take a look at the new website for the class - it is fairly sparsely populated right now, but I will be adding to it over the next week. New website: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~hamilton/ASTR220/ The website currently has i) links to the PowerPoint lectures ii) An online tool for seeing your current grade iii) Online tools for practicing mathematical calculations Attendance ---------- Today, Thursday April 5, there were 21 people present at the beginning of and maybe 30 there at the end. This is not the sign of a healthy class and I hope that we can change this. Please make every effort to attend class and to arrive on time. I understand that Professor Wilson was often late for class - I will not be. I will also make every effort to make ASTR220 lectures more interesting and more interactive. Those of you who were not in class today, please come to at least the next few lectures and give me a chance. Grading ------- I am confined to mostly follow Prof. Wilson's grading scheme. In particular, the scores on the two midterms need to stand as is. But I will make the following adjustments to the grading. First, there will be extra credit points awarded for in class participation projects. This is one way that I hope to improve attendance. In addition, I will break the final exam up into two parts - a take home component that will be due a week or two before end of the class and a final exam worth fewer points. This is a way to get a "homework" into the class without contradicting Prof. Wilson's syllabus. You will have the option of doing the take home part or not. If you choose not to, the in-class part of the final will count the full 40% of the class grade. Based on your comments on how long the midterms took, I will put substantially more questions (worth fewer points each) on the in-class final so that not knowing the answer to a single question will not hurt you as much. Finally, the final exam will be heavily weighted on the material that we covered today through the end of the semester. It will be particularly heavily weighted on things that I emphasize in class - these may not all be contained in the Power Point slides that are posted online, so again I encourage you to come to class. The TA and I will run a review session before the final to help you prepare. Watch the class webpage for further updates ... Exam 2 ------ The test was uniformly disliked by those of you who filled out my midcourse evaluation sheet. I will look into this and may decide to throw out a question or two (the one that required a calculator comes to mind). I will get back to you on this. Dropping the Course ------------------- The drop deadline for courses is Tuesday, April 10. I strongly encourage you all to come to class on Tuesday and talk to me if you are considering dropping the class. Before doing so, check my grading tool on the new class webpage - I have my grading policy explained there and you can see how well you are doing compared to the rest of the class. You each also have an estimated grade showing roughly how I plan to curve the grades. Currently only Midterm 1 is graded, although Yana will do her best to have Midterm 2 graded by this Sunday. Watch the Grade Page for updates! Doug Hamilton