Requirements: Grades will be based primarily on 4 tests during the semester and a 5th test during the final exam period (18% each). Each is primarily devoted to the portion of the course since the previous test; however, the material in the course is naturally cumulative, and, in addition, a portion of the final test will consist of questions that are specifically designed to look back to earlier parts of the course. The rest of your grade (10%) will reflect your class attendance and participation and the regularity with which you have handed in homework assignments.

Attendance and homework: You will be automatically excused from a class if you notify me in advance that you will miss it (e-mail or voice-mail messages are fine). After the fact, you will be excused if you give me a good reason or a dean’s excuse.

I don’t credit homework that I receive late (i.e., after the beginning of the class when it is due), so (depending on the circumstances) I may ask you to submit homework in advance if you arrange to miss a class; an excuse sufficient to excuse you from class after the fact is sufficient to excuse you from the homework due that day. But even if homework will not be credited, I encourage you to submit it for feedback, and I will be happy (even delighted) to give you feedback on exercises I haven’t assigned as homework.

Homework assignments will be made in class and are due at the beginning of the next class. If you miss a class, I’ll expect you to seek out the homework assignment. I’ll be happy to respond to e-mail and phone calls about this, but the assignments will be posted on the class web site (unless I forget—so don’t count on finding them at the last minute).

Text: The full text, Notes for Elementary Symbolic Logic, is available on line. A link to the table of contents is at the left of this window and you can find links to individual sections in the calendar and list of topics (to which there are also links at the left). Most of the content of the text is also available in pdf format (there are links to that both in the table of contents and the list of topics); however, there are some animated or interactive components that can be used only with a web browser.

The text uses a number of special symbols. These must be available in fonts on your system in order for them to appear in the online html version of the text. Such fonts are available on most recent operating systems, but browsers (older versions of Internet Explorer in particular) will not always find their way to the correct symbols. There is a test for problems at the bottom of this page; but some problems are intermittent, so they can show up later even if they don’t appear now. You will stand the best chance of avoiding them if you use a browser other than IE (e.g., Firefox, Safari, or Chrome) and also have the “STIX” fonts installed on your system. Those fonts are available at:

The following table lists the more important symbols we will use. For each, it shows how your current set-up displays the symbol, what the symbol looks like in the STIX fonts, and the standard code number for it.

browser	STIX	Unicode
∧		U+2227
¬		U+00AC
∨		U+2228
→		U+2192
←		U+2190
∀		U+2200
∃		U+2203
●		U+25CF
○		U+25CB
⊨		U+22A8
⫤		U+2AE4
⊭		U+22AD
≃		U+2243
⊤		U+22A4
⊥		U+22A5
▵		U+25B5
▿		U+25BF
⧖		U+29D6

It doesn’t matter if the symbol doesn’t look exactly like the image shown at its right, but you will need to be able to recognize it as the same sort of shape. Again, you may run into problems later even if things look fine now; so whenever you see a symbol you don’t expect, you should compare what you are seeing with the pdf version of the text or homework.