Exam 1 will consist of five questions, similar to questions on our first two homework assignments.
One can best prepare for this exam by playing some more with these exercises. Leave aside the hardest exercises, and look for different ways to solve the easier exercises. Come to the exam loose and prepared to have some fun. At the exam, try to come up with answers any way you can.
I haven’t posted solutions to our homework exercises. The most important skill you can develop for the exam is to find ways to figure out if you are right, working problems without an answer key available. There is never a single right way to solve a counting problem, and you don’t want to confine yourself to my approaches to problems. Working a problem several different ways is always the most interesting way to check your work.
I am offering the opportunity to submit a makeup exam, for students who aren’t happy with their exam first scores.
For each question that you didn’t correctly answer on the exam, please submit two different solutions for the corresponding makeup question. If you have the correct count both ways, then I will raise that problem score to 5 out of 6 points.
Please submit this makeup exam as soon as you can, but no later than before our second exam.
(Working a problem by several approaches is the only way I know to be certain of a count. It was distressing to all of us that I took off so many points for wrong answers, but I’m not going to change my ways!)