Grading finished

We have now completed the grading of the exam, but it may still take some time before the individual grades are available in the system. The results were rather depressing with the following grade distribution: 

A: 6

B: 11

C: 6

D: 15

E: 5

F: 25

This gives a failing rate of 36.8% (the official one may be even higher as it also counts students who withdrew during the exam).

There are probably several factors contributing to the miserable results. One is that problem 4 turned out to be harder than I expected beforehand, another that many of the candidates seemed to be lacking in exam training: A lot of points were lost on sloppy calculations, missing arguments, and failures to communicate (some of the papers gave the impression of candidates mumbling to themselves instead of trying to communicate their thoughts to others).

The attendance (of lectures as well as problem sessions) has been extremely low this year, and I cannot help think that this has contributed to the depressive outcome: Mathematics of the kind presented in MAT2400 is hard to study on one's own; it needs to be practiced, discussed, and thought about from many different perspectives.

Tom