BSCI 410 
Molecular Genetics 
Fall 2008  

Questions about Homework 5

The following are questions and answers from students regarding Homework 5 (2008).
Each question is offset with a horizontal line

Do questions 4 and 5 refer to questions 1 through 3.

No!

How precisely do we need to specify the cytological position?

Within a letter is good enough (e.g. 43E rather than 43E16 for cn).

Q7: Do I need to pick one answer?

No, list all that are consistent with the results.

Q7-8: Did we cover this? When?

Yes! These questions are about epistasis analysis.  We did cover it in class on Tuesday, Dec. 7; I made sure of that.
Slides 39-42 of that lecture are most relevant.  I will come back to the topic Dec. 11 (yes, after the homework is due).

Q7-8: Do the pathways shown depict mutant genes or the wild-type genes?

The diagram shows the activity of the (wild-type) genes themselves.

How much will this homework count? Since we did not do homework 3 are you still dropping the lowest homework?

Yes! As promised, your lowest homework grade will be dropped.
The top two scores will each count twice, so that the total is out of 100.

Originally, I put on the syllabus:

"There will be five homework assignments, each worth 20 points. The lowest score will be dropped, so your homework grade will be based on your top four scores."

I decided not to assign homework for exam 2 ("homework 3"). The other homeworks were not re-numbered (so there was no homework 3, but homeworks 4 and 5). This is for consistency with the syllabus and other handouts. Each homework is out of 20 points total. Homework grades will be normalized (mean of 16, standard deviation of 2), and then the lowest of the four will be dropped. The top two of the remaining three scores will each count twice, so that the total is out of 100. Since homework counts 20% of your grade, each of the top two homework scores will therefore count 8%, and the third will count 4%, of the entire course total.

page by Steve Mount