Midterm Season and Spectral Theory

I'm done with midterms! Galois Theory and Extremal Combinatorics were some of the last classes to have exams; those midterms were on Tuesday. The Complex Analysis test was last Wednesday, and the Topology exam was the Wednesday before that. I've gotten my tests back in all my classes except Extremal Combinatorics, and overall everything went pretty well! While studying, though, I realized that it had been a while since I'd taken normal tests.

In my first two years at Olin, I took sixteen classes and only six exams. If I stretch my definition of exam, that maybe goes up to ten, but one was really a long, cumulative problem set in Transport Phenomena, and the other three were Biology quizzes, which each took a full class period to complete but all together accounted for only 20% of my course grade. Of the six "real" exams, two were self-graded based on effort (Physics of Waves and Bayesian Stats), and three were take home, open book, and open note tests in Dynamics. The last was an in class essay exam for Soviet History.

My exams for Topology, Complex, Galois, and Extremal were all in-class tests, so we had about 105 minutes to complete them. The first three were closed book; for Extremal we were allowed to use our class notes. All four of those classes will have final exams in December. Spectral Theory is exam-less, since it's based around us presenting our work to each other, and Hungarian will just have a final exam.

So, while here, I'll take nine exams, nearly doubling my generous count of how many exams I've taken in college. They're also all far more traditional exams, each weighing thirty to forty percent of my course grade. Oliners have a reputation for not caring much about grades in comparison with learning, and tied up with that is the fact that it would be very rare at Olin for one assignment or assessment to be thirty or forty percent of the grade. We might say that a particular project is half the course grade, but that project grade has a lot of components, and most of the time no single piece would be as important as my exams here are.

On top of that, grading is a bit different here. (This is a Hungary vs. US cultural difference, whereas the rest is more Olin-related.) Most of my classes are either graded on a curve or have large percentage ranges for high grades. In Complex Analysis, for example, a 75% is an A-. The median score on the Topology midterm was a 71, and that wasn't seen as low. All of this together has meant that I've thought about grades more than usual this semester.

Spectral is by far my most Olin-ish class, which I knew from the beginning would be the case. It's inquiry based and is in many ways what we wished Linearity I could be last semester. The professor, Miklos, gives us a sheet or two of problems to do and theorems to prove each week. We work on them, both alone and together, and then in class on Wednesday evenings we present the solutions to each other. Then we each write up solutions to the problems and turn them in on Sunday nights. There's no lecture. All the definitions we need are on the sheets, and we build up the theory as we go. I would definitely describe Spectral as a Do-Learn class; the goals are for us to learn spectral theory and improve in how we present and write mathematics, and we're learning all of those things by having to do them. 

In that sense I'm tempted to say it's more Do-Learn than even User-Oriented Collaborative Design because in UOCD there were some lectures and readings, but the key difference is that there's more background assumed in Spectral Theory than in UOCD. In UOCD our user-oriented design background was made up of bits and pieces from Design Nature. In Spectral Theory a few definitions before problems are enough because we all know basic linear algebra, graph theory, and group theory. Spectral Theory is probably better compared to an Olin Design Depth course in terms of level, but I haven't done my Design Depth yet, so I could be wrong. (A Design Depth is a design class taken post-UOCD. It's a graduation requirement, but there are at least a handful of classes that fulfill the requirement.)

Spectral is different from the average Olin course in that it doesn't build up to one project or final presentation. Maybe we'll reach some really beautiful theorem and it will be sort of downhill from there, but overall it's pretty evenly paced. We prove some things that are useful and some things that are beautiful, and there's always more math. Most Olin courses will either transition to some kind of final project at some point in the second half of the semester, or they're project courses all the way through, in which case they're scaffolded with a couple of major design reviews or presentations. There are milestones. In Spectral we just keep going.