[944] Midterm

[Gautam Iyer]

Hi All,

Next week we will have office hours at the following times:

    Monday 12:00-1:00 (on Zoom)
    Monday  5:30-6:30 (on Zoom)

The midterm will be on Tuesday (closed book, in class, see below).
Please bring a calculator (see restrictions below). I've put up
solutions to HW3, extra practice problems and three previous midterms. I
strongly recommend practicing by doing problems (without looking at the
solutions), and then checking your answers.

Best,

Gautam

On Sat, Nov 05, 2022 at 04:27:58PM -0400, Gautam Iyer via mscf-944 wrote:

> Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2022 16:27:58 -0400
> From: Gautam Iyer via mscf-944 <gi1242+944 at cmu.edu>
> To: mscf-944 at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> Subject: [944] Midterm
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> We have a midterm on Tue Nov 15th, in class. It will be closed book
> exam.
> 
> Syllabus: The exam will cover everything we have done in class, up to
> and including Itô's formula. I will do a few more examples of Itô's
> formula in class on Tuesday, and then I will spend Thursday doing a
> review.
> 
> Calculators: Please bring a calculator to the exam. I will follow the
> same policy recommended by other MSCF math instructors. Your calculator
> must not have electronic communications capabilities, can not access the
> internet, and can not read / store document files. (If you don't have a
> calculator, please buy one. Simple calculators are available online for
> about $10; probably you can get them for a similar price in local stores
> as well.)
> 
> The main goal of the exam is to give you an idea of how well you
> understand the material. With mathematical courses such as this one, one
> common trap is believing you understand the material because you can
> follow along in lecture, or read the books / notes. This is very
> different from being able do problems yourself! So I strongly recommend
> you practice doing problems, without looking at the solutions.
> 
> There will be no proofs on the exam. All proofs I do, or ask you to do
> on homework, are only to help you understand the material. All questions
> on your midterm will ask you to "compute something", and will have a
> clear answer (either numerical or symbolic).
> 
> The questions on the exam will not be repeats of problems you've seen
> before; but will use ideas you've seen before. Since the midterm only
> tests a few basic tools, students usually find it easier to do well on
> the midterm in comparison to the final. For example, last year about
> half the class got an A on the midterm, but only about 40% got an A on
> the final. (This is just for your information only: There are no grade
> quotas; if your performance on the exam demonstrates a solid
> understanding of the required material, you will get an A. I recall one
> year where almost 60% of the students ended with an A- or higher.)
> 
> For you to practice:
> 
>     1. I will put up midterms and solutions from the last three years on
>        this years website. (If you want more midterms, you can go to
>        last years website and look at the midterms from there. I won't
>        put up those solutions though. Also the syllabus of this course
>        was different in 2020, and didn't include the Binomial model.)
> 
>     2. On Thursday (after HW3 is due), I will put up an optional
>        homework. While this homework will not be due, the problems are
>        good practice, and some of them will be on the next homework (due
>        Nov 22).
> 
> As you can see from previous exams, there are a few questions that you
> can do directly from the basics (compute conditional expectations, Itô
> decomposition, quadratic variation, etc.). There is usually a question
> or two that requires some thought on how to do the computation. (For
> example, look at question 3 on last years midterm: A brute force
> computation will get you the answer, but will take an unreasonably long
> amount of time. But a few minutes of thinking gives a short and elegant
> solution.)
> 
> Office hours next week are the same; though I have to leave a bit early
> after class on Tuesday, so I may not be able to take too many questions.
> On Thursday, I will teach from New York. I will be in the NY office
> until about 3PM so if you have questions you can stop by after lunch.
> 
> The week of the midterm we will hold office hours on Monday at a time
> that will be announced shortly.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Gautam
> 
> 
> -- 
> They say hard work never hurt anybody, but why take the chance.
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