When I received my score on my first calculus quiz, I was shocked. The material wasn't calculus, it was pre-calculus--in fact, it was exactly the material I'd spent the previous 2 weeks teaching my own pre-calculus students! How could I have scored only an 8 out of 10? I know I sort of rushed through it, but I checked my work a couple times, I couldn't imagine making a mistake. I was a bit disappointed at what was obviously my carelessness.
A friend is taking the course with me, and a day or so after we got our scores I asked to see his answers. Oddly enough, they matched mine exactly. That honestly made me feel better, because for whatever reason I lost the points, at least I did the math correctly.
It was possible I lost points for not following the instructions to the letter. The instructions were to circle or highlight the answer; fellow West Pointers won't be surprised to learn that I double-underlined my answer (but not in red). Using a highlighter pen didn't even occur to me, I interpreted highlight to mean "draw attention to", thus the underlining. I would have accepted a loss of points for not circling or using a highlighter on my answer.
But I emailed the instructor anyway, asking if he could please let me know where he saw that I lost points. I got a reply today that he missed my complete answer on one of the problems, and he changed my score to a 10. Of course I thanked him for taking a second look.
Lesson learned: when the instructions say to circle the answer, then circle the entire answer.
For you mathies: my mistake was simple: the solution to [f(a+h)-f(a)]/h was a polynomial with 6 or so terms, and because I ran out of room on the "line" on which I was writing, I wrote 3 or 4 terms on one line with 3 or so terms immediately underneath. He saw the underline and didn't notice that the 2nd line of terms was a continuation of the 1st line. Easy to do.
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