196 lines
12 KiB
HTML
196 lines
12 KiB
HTML
<h1> Updates </h1>
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<ol>
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<li> <h2>May 7</h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> There is a review of complex numbers available in the Week 10 tutorials, provided by Prof. Jeremy Orloff of the MIT math department. A link has also been provided in the <a href="https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/wiki/view/MathReview">Math Review</a> section of the wiki. </li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>May 2 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<!-- utf-8 characters are acceptable… as are HTML entities -->
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<li> We have opened the show-answer button on the midterm… </li>
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<li> There was a four hour outage in posting ability on the discussion board Monday night… It has been fixed. We apologise for the inconvenience.</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 30 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> The midterm closed early this morning. Staff solutions will be available next week, but you are encouraged to discuss the problems that you thought were particularly hard on the discussion forum. Congratulations on making it halfway through the course! </li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 25 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> The midterm is now available. It will close after midnight on Sunday night has passed in all timezones. Specifically, it will close 12:00pm (noon) GMT, April 30th. It covers the material in weeks one through six. Good Luck!</li>
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<li> Absolutely no collaboration is allowed on the midterm. Prof. Agarwal has provided a clarification of the collaboration policy on the <a href="https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/discussion/question/55202/collaboration-guidelines"> discussion forum. </a> </li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 23 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> Reminder: the midterm will be released on Wednesday and close on Sunday. Please see the April 3 and April 9 announcements for more logistical details.</li>
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<li> Some students have put together extra study materials for the quiz. There are <a href="https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/discussion/question/45083/how-about-a-course-flashcard-system-as-a-study-aid"> flashcards </a> and <a href="https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/discussion/question/43696/summaries-for-lectures-1-to-12-more-added-april-19"> summaries </a></li>
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<li>The grading programs for the sequence 15 exercises have been fixed. Thanks to all of the participants in <a href="https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/discussion/question/49561/midterm-warning-no-spaces-allowed-in-answer-s15e1"> this thread </a> for pointing out their difficulties. </li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 23 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li>There was a bug that caused the Week 6 homework and lab to close early in some timezones. That bug has been fixed, and the due date for Week 6 assignments has been moved to Tuesday night at midnight. We apologize for the inconvenience.</li>
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<li>In order to help people study for the midterm this week, we will release the Week 6 solutions on their normal release schedule. You will be able to see them later today. Please do not look at the solutions before submitting your Week 6 assignments. We are relying on your honesty and adherence to the Honor Code in this matter.</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 16 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li>Weeks 6 and 9 will require more mathematical background than the rest of the course. Please bear with us for those two weeks. This is necessary to understanding the roots of the more intuitive tools that will be developed over the remainder of the course for understanding dynamic systems. </li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 9 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li>The wiki now saves circuits as part of the revision history. The format for entering circuits into the wiki is now the keyword "circuit-schematic:". There will be a few minutes of downtime as old circuits are converted into the new format.</li>
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<li> Although you will have 24 hours to complete the midterm, we do not anticipate that the time limit will be the limiting factor in completing the exam. We hope that it will only take you a couple of hours to finish.</li>
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<li> In order to clear up some confusion in the format the exam will take, we have posted <a href="/section/MidtermFormatExamples/"> two example exam questions</a>. </li>
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<li> At least one of the questions on the exam will be strongly inspired by a question from the homeworks, so it would be worth your time to make sure that you understand all of the homework solutions. </li>
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<li> We have released a review packet for the midterm, <a href="/static/handouts/6002x-MidTermReview-S2012-clean.pdf">without solutions </a>, and <a href="/static/handouts/6002x-MidTermReview-S2012.pdf">with solutions</a>. Note that the exam covers material from weeks one through six. If you have not yet finished going through the material for those weeks, we would encourage going through learning the material in the format that it was initially published before using these review resources.</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>April 3 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> The exam will be released in the courseware section on Wednesday, April 25th. It will be closed at the end of Sunday, April 29th. See the chart below for release and close times in selected time zones. The exam will consist of two elements in sequence: a cover sheet and the exam itself. Once you click past the cover sheet and open the exam, <strong>you will have twenty-four hours to complete it.</strong> Please be careful to keep track of your own time, as we have no mechanism to warn you when your time is about to expire.
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<br/>
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<br/>
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<table>
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<tr><td>release</td><td>close</td></tr>
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<tr><td>10:00pm GMT April 25th  </td> <td>12:00pm GMT April 30th</td></tr>
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<tr><td>5:00pm EST April 25th</td> <td>7:00am EST April 30th</td></tr>
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<tr><td>2:00pm PST April 25th</td> <td>4:00am PST April 30th</td></tr>
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<tr><td>3:30am IST April 26th</td> <td>5:30pm IST April 30th</td></tr>
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</table>
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</li>
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<li> The format of the exam will be very similar to the homeworks, with one exception: you will have a limited number of opportunities to check your answers. You will only be able to check your answers three times before you will no longer be able change your response.</li>
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<li> There was a short period this morning when the grade plot was showing percentages incorrectly due to a bug in the display code. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you run into any other display issues, please try reloading your browser.</li>
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</ul>
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</section>
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<li> <h2>April 2 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li>We will soon start using differential equations in the course material. We have posted a little bit of <a href="/wiki/view/MathReview"> math review </a> on the wiki for people who need a refresher.</li>
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<li>Please note that we are unable to change the due dates of the assignments for any person for any reason. If something unexpected comes up, we ask that you use one of your allocated two dropped homeworks or two dropped labs.</li>
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<li>The third week's assignments have been due, so new students who have registered late will not have enough dropped assignments allocated to them to earn all of the points in the course. New students are encouraged to use the course material for their own enrichment, to earn all of the points still available to be earned, or wait until the next offering </li>
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</ul>
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</section>
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<li> <h2> March 26 </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> Thomas Loch wrote a number of <a href="http://userscripts.org/tags/mitx">scripts</a> that offer
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enhancements to MITx. These scripts need a Firefox plug-in,
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<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/">GreaseMonkey</a>, in order to work.
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They provide functionality like quality and volume selection for
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videos, integration with our IRC server, and automatic advance
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of lecture sequences when a video finishes playing. Note that some sequences
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-- such as this week's tutorials -- rely on the break between videos.</li>
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<li> There's an unofficial <a href="http://irc.mitx.mit.edu/webchat/">
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web client </a> for the IRC channel now available. Please pick a
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username better than the default. </li>
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<li> There is a lab experiment this week that requires a recent
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version of Chrome or Firefox to work. This is the first content that
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will not work with IE (it processes sound in the browser in a way which
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is not possible with IE).
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</ul>
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</section>
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<li> <h2> March 19th</h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li> The last update originally listed the wrong name for the creater of the course downloader. Josiah Yan wrote the utility. </li>
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</ul>
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</section>
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</li>
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<li> <h2>March 15th</h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<ul>
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<li>We have posted solutions to the ungraded lecture exercises. Solutions
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to graded assessments will be available after the deadline.</li>
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<li> Several
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students asked about how to submit homeworks -- simply hit "check" --
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your problems are automatically checked, saved, and graded.</li>
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</ul>
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<p> As
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some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat">IRC</a>
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users already know, a couple of 6.002x students have put together
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tools that have been requested in the discussion forums: </p>
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<ul><li> Jeff Kent created a scrolling textbook viewer. We posted his tool <a href='/static/contrib/xbook.html'> here </a></li>
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<li> Josiah Yan posted a downloader for the course on his <a href='https://github.com/terriblybored/MITx-6002x-Video-Downloader'> github account. </a> </li>
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</ul>
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If you haven't visited the IRC channel
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(irc.mitx.mit.edu, channel
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#6002), feel free to download an IRC client, and check it out. Good place
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to meet other students, and occasionally, the devs.
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</section>
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</li>
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<li>
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<h2> March 12th </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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Due to student feedback in the forums, we have changed due dates from
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the beginning of the weekend to the end of the weekend. Enjoy the
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extra time to complete assignments! Otherwise, we now have better
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error messages for incorrect inputs, and a slew of other minor
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fixes. If you experience any problems after the update, please try
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holding shift and hitting the reload button in your browser.
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</section>
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</li>
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<li>
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<h2> March 8th </h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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It is great to see all the activity in the discussion forum! We recently updated <a href='/wiki/view/QuestionAnswerFAQ'> <strong>the wiki </strong> </a> with more detailed guidance on how to get help from the course staff. We encourage you to check out those guidelines in order to get the most benefit from that resource.
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</section>
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</li>
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<li>
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<h2> March 6th</h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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<p> Several key issues were reported: </p>
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<ul>
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<li> Tolerance on S1E2 was set a bit too tight -- many
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solutions (including our own -- we printed more digits at the
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time these were tested) were marked wrong since we required
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many digits. This is now corrected.
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<li> Several students reported (correctly) that our error
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messages are unclear. A dictionary:
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<div style="margin-left:50px">
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<ul> <li> "Unknown error" -- this occurs if you
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submit non-numeric answers to numeric problems. This most
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commonly occurs if a comma is used instead of a decimal point,
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or units are included.
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<li> "Syntax error" occurs when you type in a
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formula with an error. E.g. (((
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<li> "Undefined" means you used an invalid
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variable in your answer. E.g. if you used 'z' when taking the
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derivative of e^x (instead of just 'e' and 'x').
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</ul>
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</div>
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<li> Some of the documentation refers to a "save"
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button. This was eliminated based on user tests prior to
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release, but we still had references to it in our
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documentation. Please use the check button instead, which both
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checks your answers and saves.
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</ul>
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</section>
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</li>
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<li>
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<h2> March 5th</h2>
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<section class="update-description">
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Welcome to 6.002x!
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You can find a video tutorial for the system tools <a href="/courseware/6.002_Spring_2012/Overview/System_Usage_Sequence/">"System Usage Sequence"</a> in the Overview section of the courseware. There are also several system usage handouts in the handouts section on the side, including the "6.002x At-a-Glance (Calendar)". The System Usage video sequence walks you through the various features of the online learning platform, and the 6.002x At-a-Glance handout provides a detailed week-by-week schedule of course topics, textbook readings, and deadlines. After you familiarize yourself with the various features of the MITx platform, you can jump right into the coursework by working on "Administrivia and Circuit Elements", the first Lecture Sequence in Week 1.
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Enjoy the course!
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</section>
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</li>
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</ol>
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