Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 4 sessions/week, 50 minutes/session
Recitations: 1 session/week, 50 minutes/session
Prerequisites/Corequisites
There is no prerequisite. 18.02 Multivariable Calculus is a corequisite, meaning students can take 18.02 and ES.1803 simultaneously.
Course Description
The class is taught in MIT’s Experimental Study Group (ESG). ESG is one of MIT’s first-year learning communities. It is open to all first-year students, with selection by lottery. The program is limited to about 50 students and class size is usually between 4 and 12 students. The small classes allow us teach interactively and stay in close touch with what every student is finding easy or difficult.
The course is equivalent to the Mathematics Department’s 18.03 Differential Equations. They satisfy the same prerequisites and are geared to preparing students for downstream science and engineering classes.
This class met 5 times a week: four times with the instructor and once with a Teaching Assistant (TA). Class-time was a mix of interactive lecture, problem solving, and discussion. The students prepared with a reading assignment from the topic notes. Also prior to each class, we posted lecture notes, which gave an outline of what we would do in class, and a set of in-class problems with solutions. The TA led the recitation session. Recitation (also called Problem Section) was similar in spirit, except that no new material was introduced. The majority of the recitation time was devoted to students working problems in groups with help from the TA. In both class and recitation, we did not expect to cover all the problems on the problem sheets. The rest were available for self-study and quiz review.
Credits
Much of ES.1803 was created in collaboration with the people in the Mathematics Department who developed the current version of 18.03. Chief among these are Arthur Mattuck, Haynes Miller, David Jerison, Jen French, John Lewis, and Bjorn Poonen. A good fraction of the material in ES.1803 is adapted or borrowed from their work.
Textbook
This course didn’t use a textbook, but for many years we used successive versions of C. Edwards and D. Penney’s Elementary Differential Equations with Boundary Value Problems, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN: 9780136006138.
As we moved more materials online and especially after adding the unit on linear algebra, we used the textbook less and less until we stopped requiring it. Nonetheless, it remains a big influence. There are several places in the topic notes where we point to this textbook so that interested students can get further details about certain physical systems. The topic notes can be used as an online textbook.
Homework
There were nine problem sets. We created a problem set checker hosted on the MIT Open Learning Library. This allowed students to check their answers as they did the problem set. The checker only said whether they were right or wrong. It did not give them the correct answer. Homework was graded on correctness and clarity.
Quizzes
We had a series of one-hour quizzes, roughly one every two weeks. See the calendar for the exact dates. We also had a final quiz during finals week. It was not comprehensive. It covered unit 1 (our most important unit), the material done after the last quiz and one more unit of the student’s choice. It was weighted as 2.5 quizzes.
Grading
Problem sets counted for 40% of the grade, quizzes for 55%, and the remaining 5% was for participation.
In addition, a passing grade on the final quiz was required in order to pass the class.
