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Undergraduate Program:
Senior Project Goals
In order to help a student choose a senior project, it
is important for the faculty member to keep two things in mind: (1) the
goal of the project, as opposed to the variety of goals in mathematics
courses; (2) the level of difficulty of the project, which should be appropriate
for the student's mathematical background. My view is that the primary
goal of the senior project is to provide the student an opportunity to
create a coherent story involving several proofs or calculations, each
of which is at a level that the student has already shown he or she can
handle.
It is not reasonable to ask a student who has typically
earned B's or B-'s on tests to now create a coherent story involving the
types of problems that on tests are used to decide who deserves an A or
A-. Rather the goal is a to provide a capstone experience in which the
student combines mathematics that he or she already understands with some
new mathematics or applications at the same level.
Bert Fristedt,
Professor of Mathematics
www@math.umn.edu
URL http://www.math.umn.edu/index.shtml
The University of Minnesota
is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
2000, The Regents of the University of Minnesota
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