How to work

Weeks 1–5: what to bring, how homework is handed in, how to use the notebooks.

Nothing is installed on your laptop. The exam is on paper with a non-programmable calculator, so that is where the practice happens. Code is an optional companion, described below.

Bring to every session

  • Paper and pen. Drills are done by hand, in exam format, and kept: they are the record of your progress.
  • A non-programmable calculator. The same kind you will have in the final exam. Get used to it now: logs, powers, eˣ.
  • Renshaw, Maths for Economics (5th ed.), the module’s required text. Chapters per week are listed on the schedule.

Homework

Set every Thursday, corrected together in class the following Thursday. Two parts, 2–3 hours in total:

  1. A drill set on paper. Bring the paper itself: nothing is handed in or emailed. Show all work: the marks in the exam are for the method, and so is the feedback here.
  2. A memo to the Board, 150–250 words, typed. Numbers and their meaning, no formulas in the text. This is a rehearsal of the register the midterm asks for.

Homework is formative and not graded. The first 15–20 minutes of each session are spent going through it at the board: you walk us through your working and we correct it together. Bring what you tried even where you got stuck — that is the part worth correcting. Homework 5, the last of weeks 1–5, has no session after it and is sent by email instead. There is no upload and no deadline to miss — the two formal assessments are the ones that go through Turnitin.

The notebooks

Each session has a Colab notebook, driven by the tutor from the projector in class: sliders that move a parameter, the picture behind each formula, and at the end every drill of the week solved in Python, one cell per drill. It is not examined. Do the drill on paper first, then run the cell and compare. You can open it yourself from the Colab ↗ link on the schedule with any Google account; nothing to install, nothing to submit.

Drills and solutions

The drills page of each week has the in-class exercises with worked solutions at the bottom, folded. Do the drill first, then open the solution and compare step by step, the way an examiner would.

Core items are for everyone. Stretch items are for whoever finishes early.

Writing mathematics the way the exam wants it

  • Write the equation in words first (“break-even means revenue equals cost”), then in symbols.
  • Every quadratic: divide out the common factor, compute the discriminant, comment on its sign.
  • Every inequality: find the roots, draw the sign line, write the answer as an interval.
  • Every log problem: take logs of both sides, bring the exponent down, use the calculator only at the end.
  • Intervals: [ for included endpoints, ( for excluded ones and for ±∞.

Questions between sessions

Use the course chat channel for quick questions and to arrange an office hour. Deliverables go on Moodle only.