Guidelines for the preparation of assignments

Here are some standards and guidelines for the preparation of your assign-ments which relate to units offered by the Department of Mathematics.

Work must be tidy and legible. Dont try to cram all your work intoone page. Do not submit rough drafts make a neat final submission.In particular, torn out pages from spirax notebooks are not acceptable.Provide plenty of space on the left and right margins so that the markercan provide comments and suggestions on your work.

Handwritten assignments are perfectly acceptable. As a matter of fact,we recommend that you utilise your time fruitfully by working on yourproblems rather than typing up the answers.

Most importantly, you must show all your working in a tidy and orderlyway: no working translates into no marks. Present both the questionand your solution logically and clearly dont try and cram 15 linesof calculations onto 2 lines. Quote the formulas that you are using.Answers must be clearly identifiable at the end of your question. Allthis will help the marker to understand and appreciate your arguments,which in general translates into better marks.

It is not illegal to use grammatically correct English sentences in yourassignment. Indeed, it is considered to be good practice to presentyour work in a logically coherent way, and to write out and justifyyour arguments carefully and explicitly. A good assignment shouldcommunicate the ideas clearly and neatly and should be a pleasure toread. If you grab any good undergraduate mathematics textbook, youwill quickly find out that there is usually a careful balance betweenthe authors use of English sentences and mathematical expressions,where one clarifies the other and vice versa. Use mathematical notationcorrectly.

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When you are dealing with numerical computations, simplify your an-swer as much as possible, but express numbers algebraically (i.e. leaveyour solutions in closed form). Unless requested explicitly, do not writedecimal expansions in your final answer. For example, 1/3 is far moreprecise than 0.333333333 .

Do not use red pens, since the markers also use red pens to evaluateassignments.

If your assignment requires the presentation of the graph of some func-tion, please use a ruler for all graphs and label the axes appropriately.Give reasons as to why you think this graph is correct. In addition,draw graphs within the presentation of your solution do not drawon the original assignment sheet graphs.

On the next pages you can find two examples of potential assignment ques-tions and various ways in which answers are formulated, ranging from a rea-sonably bad presentation to progressively better ways to answer the question.For both questions, the last answer is much preferable to the previous threepresentations, because the reader understands better the argument that thestudent is trying to make.

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