Communicating Mathematics through Homework

Learning mathematics at Harvey Mudd College involves learning how to communicate your ideas effectively. As a student, much of this communication will be in the form of homework. Therefore, so that we may provide you with meaningful and worthwhile feedback, it is important that you put your homework in an easy to read, easy to navigate format. After all, how you present your work should enhance the ideas you are trying to communicate, not impede them. With that in mind, the following are some suggestions for submitting homework in your mathematics courses.

• Your handwriting should be legible.
• Homework with multiple pages should be stapled in the upper left-hand corner.
• In the upper right-hand corner you should write (in this order)
  • Your Name
  • Your Class and Section Number
  • The Homework Set Number
  • The Due Date of the Homework
• Problems should be clearly labeled and numbered on the left side of the page. There should also be a visible separation between problems.
• Each solution should begin with the original problem statement.
• You should leave the top left margin and the entire left margin blank so that graders may use this space for scoring and comments.
• To ensure that each problem is graded, problems should be written in the order they are assigned.
• It is good practice to first work out the solutions to homework problems on scratch paper, and to then neatly write up your solutions. This will help you to turn in a clean finished product.
• Some classes allow you to work jointly on assignments. You should write up your solutions by yourself, unless you are specifically told otherwise by your instructor. Also, you should always acknowledge any help received, at the top of the assignment or in the margin.

Easy to Read Homework Format

Using LaTeX to Format Your Homework

The department provides a LaTeX class file and supporting templates and instructions that you can use to format your homework. By using the class, you can have all the power of LaTeX for typesetting your mathematical expressions and textual answers as well, with none of the hassles that come with Word, and none of the worries that come with writing your solutions by hand!

The class, templates, and documentation are available from

http://www.math.hmc.edu/computing/support/tex/classes/hmcpset/