Information and Policies

Table of Contents

Instructors:

Karl Berggren, berggren@mit.edu Room 36-219 in suite 36-213 (ring doorbell), Ext. 4-0272

Jeff Lang, Room 10-176, Extension 3-4687, lang@mit.edu

Farnaz Niroui, Room 13-3005b, fniroui@mit.edu

Adam Hartz, Room 38-591, hz@mit.edu

Course Administrators:

Dorothy Fleischer dotf@mit.edu in Suite 36-213, Ext. 3-7545

Rinske Wijtmans Robinson wijtmans@mit.edu, in Suite 36-213, Ext. 3-754

Available Monday, Wednesday & Friday 9:30am-4pm

TAs:

Lark Savoldy hsavoldy@mit.edu

Grace Tang gtang@mit.edu

The TA offices for office hours are inside the EDS space, Room 38-501, unless specified otherwise.

Emails:

Content questions: 6200-staff@mit.edu

Automatic extension requests: 6200-extensions@mit.edu

Special extension requests (e.g. illness, personal crisis): s3-support@mit.edu, after you receive s3 support, use 6200-personal@mit.edu to follow up with us.

Conflict exam request (at least one week before exam): 6200-conflicts@mit.edu

The primary system for requesting help should be asking questions during recitation or lecture. Secondarily, you may email 6200-staff@mit.edu with questions. Questions must be self-contained, i.e., they should not require the reader to leave the email in order to understand the question. That means you should include a screen grab of the portion of the assignment you’re working on.

The only pre-req for this class is 8.02. Some topics you should feel comfortable with before taking this course:

• Graphing linear functions (y = mx + b etc.). You will need to move quickly between the traditional mathematical version of these graphs, and graphs involving current and voltage.

• Logarithms (remember those? Yes, now you actually need to use them...)

• Solving simultaneous linear equations graphically

• Solving simultaneous linear algebraic equations analytically

• Complex numbers and phasors (i.e. complex numbers in cartesian and polar notation)

• Taylor series, in particular first-order series expansions of common functions like \sin\!\left(x\right), \cos\!\left(x\right), e^x, \sqrt{1+x}, etc.

• Fundamental theorem of calculus (the change of the value of a function across an interval is the integral of its derivative over that interval).

Lectures:

One-hour lectures will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:00 AM in Room 3-270.

During class times, laptops and tablets may only be used for note taking. Because of the negative impact that multitasking with technology has on learning for the neighbors of the multitasker (see, e.g., "Laptop Multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers" by Sana, Weston, and Cepeda; Computers & Education, 62 (2013) 24-31), the use of laptops, tablets, and cellular phones or any other distracting technology for purposes other than note taking is not permitted in class.

And if you are using a laptop for notetaking, consider the opinion presented here: "The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantage of Longhand Over Laptop Notetaking" by Mueller and Oppenheimer; Psychological Science, 25 (2014) 1159-1168. If you still wish to use your laptop for notetaking, you may do so.

Notice, if you are observed using a phone, tablet, or laptop for a non-note-taking purpose, you may be asked to shut down your computer, or to leave the classroom.

Recitations:

One-hour-long recitations are scheduled for Wednesdays as shown in the chart below. You should attend your assigned recitation throughout the entire term. If you need to change your recitation assignment, please inform your TA or the Head TA in advance.

Depending on enrollment, we may need to add or remove recitations–if so, we will announce these changes to the class at a later point.

Office Hours:

Individual course staff will have office hours as outlined below:

• Karl: Wednesdays from 1-3:30 p.m.. You may self-book for a 15-min-long slot here.
• Jeff: TBD
• Farnaz: TBD
• Adam: Tuesdays 8am-10am, 38-530
• TAs: Tuesdays 5-7, 36-153; Wednesdays 5-8, 38-530

Open Lab Hours:

During the TAs' Wednesday office hours and Adam's Tuesday morning office hours, we will have the lab open (primarily for help with finishing labs and checkoffs, though this time may also be used for conceptual questions, pset questions, etc.).

Readings:

The course notes are posted to the course website, and are the main resource for students who wish to master specifically the content in the class.

However, it is strongly reocmmended that students also take advantage of the the 6.200 textbook, Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Agarwal and Lang, which is available for free online via the MIT library. After searching the library website, select “view full text”. It can be read online or downloaded in three different formats. There are also a small number of physical copies of the book on reserve at Barker Library.

Videos:

A number of videos are available for studying and preparation for lectures and recitations. These are available on the course web-page here.

Circuit Simulators:

Circuit simulators may be used throughout the course as much as you wish to help you check your answers on psets and labs. However, you must always show your work, and that work cannot include a simulator unless the question explicitly calls for it.

In principle, it may be possible to avoid understanding certain concepts by relying on simulators to help. You will not have a simulator available on the exams, so you should only use them as a learning tool.

Problem Sets:

There will be approximately weekly problem sets assigned in 6.200 this semester, with two shorter psets assigned during midterm weeks. Psets are intended to be representative of the difficulty you will encounter in midterms. As a result, if you rely too much on help from your study group on your psets, you may be challenged by the problems on the midterm.

Corrected homework will typically be available by Thursday, the week after the homework is collected.

In order to give students maximum opportunity to learn from the psets. Psets will be due at 11 p.m. on Thursdays (unless otherwise specified) and a one hour automatic grace period will be provided for unexpected difficulties scanning or uploading.

You may request a one-day extension on any problem set without contacting S³ for support by emailing 6200-extensions@mit.edu with the request. Do not provide an explanation: please keep your request to one sentence. The request must be received before the original deadline and will automatically be granted without acknowledgement. You may not use multiple requests on the same pset, but you may make a request for a single-day extension on any number of psets. So, for example, you may request a 1 day extension on two psets, but you may not request a 2 sequential 1-day extensions on a single pset.

Requests for additional extensions (more than one day on a single pset) will only be provided in extenuating circumstances (e.g. sickness, illness of a close family member, difficult personal circumstances) and must be requested through S³, and be received with an accompanying letter of support from an S³ dean. Support may be requested from s3-support@mit.edu

Homework consists of a pdf file with open-ended problems to be submitted via Gradescope. The problem sets are linked from the calendar on the front page. Each homework also includes a pre-lab question (due at the same time as the rest of the problem set, before the week's lab) that will be submitted online through this web site.

Homework with poor scan quality will not be graded, and will not receive credit. A number of high-quality phone apps are available for scanning, but all of these require the scan to be performed in a well-lit environment. A conventional scanner (available at the MIT Libraries) may be advisable if a camera-app scan is not producing high-quality output for you. Be sure to allow yourself sufficient time to successfully scan your work prior to submission–especially the first couple times you do it, while you work out the bugs.

If you are seeking people to work with on psets, 6.200 is signed up for http://psetpartners.mit.edu/. You may look for partners there.

If you'd like to email the staff for help on a pset, please email 6200-questions@mit.edu

Labs:

Labs will be held on Fridays in 38-530. There will be 3 lab sessions offered. 9-11, 12-2, and 2:30-4:30. You must come to your assigned lab session. If you have a conflict with your assigned lab slot, please let the course staff know at 6200-admin@mit.edu. Please come only to your assigned lab section (we'll make assignments midway through the first week of class) and be on time.

Labs are assessed by a combination of online questions (submitted online via the lab page) and checkoff conversations with staff members. Portions of the lab completed during your lab section will receive full credit. Portions submitted between the end of your lab section and the start of your next lab section will receive 75% credit. Late submissions beyond that point will only receive credit in situations of extenuating personal or medical circumstances, with written support from S³.

Note that the automatic one-day extension policy for problem sets does not apply to labs; to consider extensions on labs, we need to receive written support from S³.

Mid-Terms:

Two-hour closed-book evening mid-term exams will be given from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM on Wednesday 3/8 in the Stata Center 32-123, and Wednesday 4/19 in Walker Memorial 50-340.

Since these two mid-terms will be held in the evenings, the recitations immediately preceding each mid-term exam will be canceled. Those are the recitations of Wednesday, 3/8 and Wednesday 4/19. If you have a conflict for one of these exam slots, please reach out as soon as possible (but no later than one week before the exam) to 6200-conflicts@mit.edu.

In addition, a single approximatly 1-hour long exam will be given during regular class time (11-12) on Thursday May 11 instead of lecture on that day in 3-270. No conflict exam will be offered for this midterm..

Final Exam:

A three-hour-long final exam will be given during the end-of-term exam week. Its timing and room assignment will be determined by the registrar and announced later in the semester.

Exam Note Pages and Calculators

In all exams, a single 8.5"\times11" page of notes, double-sided, will be permitted. You are recommended to place only a few key formulas and concepts on these, and instead focus your exam studying on active recall methods.

Calculators will not be allowed in any exams.

Regrade requests:

Graded materials will be returned via our automated on-line grading system. You will have two weeks after assessment material is returned to request a grading review. Your request must be accompanied by a written explanation of why you think a grading mistake was made.

Weights:

Initial grades will be distributed as follows:

Approximately 8 to 10 times at random during the semester, we will administer a short learning assessment to the class (in lecture or recitation) designed to provide feedback to the instructors on where students currently are in their learning. These 5-min-long assessments will be graded based on participation (i.e. full credit will be granted for making an attempt on the problem). Students will be given a small bonus (approximately 0.25%) to their overall course grade for participating in each assessment, thus a student who participates in all assessments will receive a 2%-2.5% bonus to their final grade in the class.

Letter Grades:

These lines can be adjusted downward, but not upward, at the discretion of the course staff at the end of the course if they feel it appropriate given the difficulty of the course assignments and exams. (i.e., the staff may make it easier to obtain an A or B at their discretion, but not harder).

The initially-assigned letter grade will be followed by considerable discussion among the teaching staff to factor in their direct observation of your understanding of the material and the trend of your performance in 6.200 over the course of the term. Again, this discussion could improve your letter grade, particularly if your initial grade is on a letter-grade boundary, but it cannot lower your grade.

This subject has been designed so that lectures, recitations, office hours, and homework are integral and essential parts of the learning process. A prepared student who diligently spends 12 hours per week on the course material using effective study methods should achieve complete mastery of that material, and earn an A in the class as a result.

Students are expected to spend three hours each week in class (lecture and recitation); two hours in lab; approximately two hours outside of class doing the course reading, reviewing lecture notes, attending office hours, and preparing for lecture and recitation; and approximately five hours working on the problem set or studying for a quiz/midterm. Of course these estimates will vary somewhat from student to student depending on degree of preparation and their preferred learning style.

Lectures are significantly more impactful if everyone comes and plans to participate, asking questions and paying attention (lecturers "read the room" and respond if they see engagement/confusion in the audience). In our experience, students who attend all lectures succeed at a much higher rate than those whose attendance starts to flag later in the semester.

Similarly, starting problem sets early is critical to success in the class. The best way to make recitations and office-hours useful is to arrive having made an attempt on the problem-set and bringing questions for follow-up.

One of the most common mistakes we see from students who struggle in 6.200 is neglecting to learn basic terminology and master mathematical skills early in the course, leading to great difficulty as the course content becomes more challenging. Do not neglect the first few weeks of the term, which may at first seem similar to your physics curriculum. There are similarities, but there are also differences, and the differences are important.

Finally, recent research in the field of cognitive science has pointed to learning techniques that many students have used for years. Two excellent recent books you might wish to reference to improve your own learning efficiency are:

• How We Learn: The surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why it Happens by Benedict Carey
• Make it stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. Daniel

They are both available at the MIT Library or at any online bookseller.