First Calculus Quiz

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.