Grading
Final letter grades will be based on a series of written homeworks, three in-class quizzes, and the quality of a final project in which you will design and build a module for a modular synthesizer. The average of your quizzes will be equally weighted with the average of your homework grades. (There will be no “drops” of lowest quiz or homework grades).
Attendance: I will be taking attendance on most lecture days. If you miss more than 4 lectures or often arrive excessively late or leave excessively early, I am likely to take notice, and reserve the ability to take that into account when assigning grades at the end of the semester.
Homeworks: The homeworks are intended to be instructive and enlightening, and in particular get you looking at schematics of real synthesizers that have been in production, and not “textbook” problems. I try to avoid giving anything resembling “busywork.”
Quizzes: The first quiz will be given about 1/3 through the class, and the second will be given about 2/3 of the way through the class. Both will be closed book. The first quiz will focus on basic facts about circuits and electronic facts that a designer needs to have “at their fingertips,” without having to stop and look up, in order facilitate a smooth creative workflow. I will provide extremely detailed information about what I will ask on that quiz. The second quiz (roughly covering the first half of the lecture material: OTAs, VCAs, VCOs, waveshapers, and linear and exponential converters) third quiz (roughly covering the second half of the lecture material: VCFs) will probe what kind of intuition you have developed concerning the class material; the questions will be more qualitative in nature (for instance: if the value of resistor X is increased, will the frequency of this oscillator go up or down?), in the sense that they will not require tedious calculations with precise numeric results. There will be no usual written final exam given during final exam week.
Final project: The final project will permit (and encourage) you to make extensive use of various existing schematics you might find on the web, in textbooks, or elsewhere. Details about the final project will be posted at a later date. Historically, a project “team” consisted of 1 or 2 students. Because this semester is much larger than it has been in the past, so I may allow teams of 2 or 3 people. Projects with two or three will be expected to be somewhat more ambitious than projects with smaller teams.
I consider the final project to be the most important thing in the class; hence, your course grade will max out at whatever your project grade is, e.g., if you do B work on the homeworks, etc., but turn in an A project, you might get an A for the class, or you might get a B; but if you do A work on everything else but turn in B level project, your grade won’t be an A.
I will work with you very closely in helping you with your final project. By the end of the semester, I will have a pretty accurate feel for what concepts you understand and what concepts you don’t.
Administrivia
Classroom decorum: In general, please do not instant message, websurf, Facebook (can I use it as a verb?), e-mail, play games, etc. during class. It can be quite distracting. Unless told otherwise, the preferred position for laptops during class is in your backpack.
The Twitter exception: If Prof. Lanterman says something particularly brilliant and clever during lecture, you are allowed to use your phone to Tweet it and/or post it to Facebook.
T-square usage: In spite of its awfulness, I will use T-square for posting grades and sending e-mail announcements.
Major emergencies: If you have some sort of major life emergency – serious illness or injury, death in the family, house burns down or is flooded, etc. – that seriously impedes your progress in the class, please let me know as soon as possible so we can work something out. You will find professors can be quite reasonable if you keep us in the loop. Please don’t disappear with no warning half way through, making me think that you dropped the class, and then reappear out of nowhere the week before finals asking what you can do to make things up. (Yes, this has happened quite a bit, in both undergrad and grad classes.)