I read in the course review that the December 2009 exam was brutal.. how about the 2010 one? Did the final tend to be astronomically harder than the midterms? :(

last years exam.. I honestly can't remember too much about it. it wasn't bad, as in my mark did not drop. the questions on the latter parts of the course (voumes / surface area of revolution) were super easy textbook questions. there was a ridiculous optimization question that i redid 100 times and ran out of time (it was one of those ones where u try to see the best way to run a pipe - across the water, the shoreline, or a mix of both and there were different prices and units that you had to change). the integrations were not bad, the format was very similar to what they posted as practice (I had Haskell and she posted a practice exam / midterms on her website last year and they were fairly representative). if you've done all the webassign and understand all the concepts for the theorums then you'll - of course - be set!

Mine was brutal! Dec 2009 ... FML
So glad I don't have to do math anymore

Based off the 2009 exam, I would say as an average, the exam mark may drop 15% from your midterms...many more (and harder) questions...

The 2009 final exam was much much worse than usual, for two reasons:

1) 1LS3 and 1A03 wrote in the same rooms (ie. the gyms). Many people in 1LS3 wrote 1A03 exams and vice versa. This created a huge headache for the professors, who had to somehow assign marks to students who wrote the wrong exams. (In particular, it was unfair for students who wrote say, half the 1LS3 exam, then realized halfway through and did the 1A exam in 1.5 hours).

2) The professors collaborated incorrectly. The rule of thumb is, make most of the exam a bit easier than the midterms, and choose one or two more difficult problems to distinguish the students who deserve an A+. However, what the professors failed to do was come to a consensus regarding which problems were difficult. The professors took the 'easier topics' that appeared early on in the semester (like limits and continuity), and made these really hard. Then they intended on making some of the integration/derivative problems easier, but these are generally the harder topics in the course.

The result: Every question was hard (for most students).


They've learned from their mistakes however, and this should not happen again. (In 2010, the exam was markedly easier, and the results higher...I expect 2011 will follow the same trend)

shouldn't they give us a higher grade then ?? (ppl who wrote it in 2009)

From what I understand they did try to be as fair as they could, and adjusted the grades for that particular year, in general...but on an individual basis, it may not work out that way, depending on your specific score.

In other words, your grade may have been bellcurved (there's a good chance it was), but not necessarily if your score accurately reflected your marks on the previous midterms. (I don't know precisely what they did, I was not TAing that particular course at the time)

EDIT: Additionally, I wanted to point out that the department is a leader in research relating to first year success in Mathematics (It's what Dr. Lovric researches). This is a big mystery, it's anyone's guess why students' marks drop more from highschool to first year math, than in any other subject.

That being said, they try to spoonfeed first year students as much as possible by giving them very similar practice problems, a course ware with practice assignments/tests, and so on. I'm not saying this makes the course easy, but profs genuinely want the students to do well in the math department. (I know it may not always seem this way...). I know for a fact that for Math 1K03, the professor literally gave them every single question type that would be on the final, because the average was rather low. If Math 1A is babied less this term, it's simply because the test results were sufficiently high.

(But then, this doesn't always help...I took a course a few years ago where the professor literally gave us the final exam a week before we wrote it...and the average was still 40%).

Yeah I had it in Dec 2009, it was somewhat difficult but not impossible.

I think if you study and most importantly, if you practice integration without knowing what technique to use you'll be good to go. So, use section 7.5 in the Stewart textbook, where they give you a bunch of integration problems without telling you to use substitution, by parts, etc. As opposed to 7.1 which is by parts I think, and so forth. That will help a lot on the exam because you'll already have practice deciding which strategy to use.