Question on homework grading policy

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Good afternoon Professor Taylor, 

I hate to bug you before the weekend however I wanted to get some feedback from you regarding the homework assignment. From my what I could gather there were over 40 problems for the first homework assignment and I received **/10 even after completing all the problems with over 2 hours invested as well. If the graders are only selecting a few problems from the assignment how does this reflect on my grade and the overall assignment? I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend and I look forward to class on Monday. 

Thanks again!

Sincerely, 

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OK,  some comments on how the homework is graded and why.  

The reason homework is assigned is because people learn the material they get from the lectures and textbook much better if they actually have experience using it. We encourage that by assigning homework and making the homework scores a small part of the course grade, but the real payoff comes from the improvement of your exam scores.

Providing corrected homework is useful for those students who study the corrections.  However, grading homework requires investment of human effort, which requires investment of money.  The grader is hired to spend 3 hrs per week on grading your homework.  While I would prefer all the homework problems be graded, that would require a good deal more money than we have.  Given these constraints, the homework problems to be graded are chosen randomly within each homework assignment, but spread between all the sections in a given homework assignment.  Since they are random, over the semester they will evenly sample the spectrum of difficulty, usually of intermediate difficulty, but occasionally being the more difficult or easy.  The same selection of problems is graded for everyone's homework--everyone gets the same treatment.  Everyone also has a number of other resources for getting feedback on the homework, including in-class questions, my office hours and the various engineering and mathematics tutoring opportunities.

Now as far as the effort that you should spend on homework and study for this course, by googling around you can find various answers. One common rule (e.g. here) is that for every hour in class, outside of class you should spend two hours if the class is easy, three hours for an average class and four hours for a difficult class.  Since MAT 243 is three hours per week and most students seem agree that it's not an easy class, that would mean your should be spending nine to twelve hours weekly outside of class.  If you spent just two hours doing your homework, it sounds like you've seriously underestimate the level of effort required for this course.