I was forbidden from using this method on the final, since it isn't the ad-hoc method that was taught.
Then the first test came. I seemingly had no problem with it. A few days later, the tests were returned. Everyone got theirs back except for me. I was summoned to the front of the room and the teacher asked me to explain how I did things. We went over the first problem, she understood my explanation. The second, same thing. I was continuing my explanations and she cut me off--"Forget it; I trust you." She flipped the paper over and wrote 100 on it and gave it to me.
Boy did that make me never want to do any work in that class again. Apparently I and the eventual valedictorian of our class were real pains in the asses to her. We were "punished" by being given a box of magazines (Scientific American, etc.) and told to sit in the back of the room and not talk.
I apologize, Ms. M., for being nuissance, but I think this was a fair treatment rather than being scolded for having my own ways of doing things.
Showing work is required, and if work contains a matrix then they'd just mark it as zero.
I wonder if they did it purely to reduce the workload of the TAs which will be grading the finals, or did somebody think it would be wrong to have an unorthodox path to the result.
But that's their job. And it's the university's to hire enough TAs to do a good, through, job
"Remark 2. The theorem proved here gives a completely new general method. It generalizes all known results for balancing chemical equations cited chronologically in references [1]–[125]." http://www.siam.org/journals/problems/downloadfiles/71-025s....
Reference 125 is to this paper.
1 - Yes
2 - Good luck with that
3 - Take a look on DNA computing (wikipedia et all)
Another term, an A was promised for anyone turning in a "print out" of the numbers from 1 to 1 million. Dad, coming to the rescue again, got me access to a Microfilm printer at his work, and taught me just enough FORTRAN to generate the list. (Yeah, short program, all about the formatting.) Another easy A. The teacher's expression was priceless.
The way you write it it seems like you think that it was stupid for a professor to give you an A for such easy things. However I bet you learned a lot.
Because I mentioned the expression on his face? I didn't intend to convey that I was laughing at him for that - only that he was (understandably) surprised, and I enjoyed that.
I don't think it was stupid. The chemical equation balancing was highly relevant, and I did learn a lot from that. In some sense it was like "testing out" of the class - by mastering a homework challenge that was much harder than any of the class material.
The "million" challenge was interesting as well, and I did learn from it, but not about Chemistry. I knew I had the A less than halfway into the term, so I stopped doing chem homework. That was not optimal if the goal was to teach me Chemistry. In that sense, the first challenge was probably better.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantine_equation#System_of... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_normal_form
