PLB/GLG 335 General Information

Spring 2007

Instructor

Professor Ralph E. Taggart

Departments of Plant Biology and Geological Sciences

206 Nat. Sci.

Ph. 355-4626

E-mail: taggart@.msu.edu

Office Hours: By Appointment.

Grading

Your grade will be based on a total of five exams. Four hour exams (each worth 50 points) will be given during the term as noted on the class schedule. The final exam will be given according the University Regular Final Exam Schedule and is also worth 50 points. Your final grade in the course will be based on a total-points frequency distribution (maximum possible points = 250). If the mean for the class equals or exceeds 188 points (75%), a standard grading scale (4.0 = 90%, 3.5 = 85%, 3.0 = 80%, 2.5 = 75%, 2.0 = 70%, 1.5 = 65%, 1.0 = 60%) will be used. If the class mean falls below 188 points, grades will be curved, at my discretion) to yield a reasonable distribution of final grades. All grade cut-off values will be final.

Missed Exams

No make-up exams will be offered. In general, the only valid excuse for missing an exam is illness. If you are too ill to take an exam, be sure to obtain a treatment notice from your physician or the health center. They will probably not cure you but they will get you off the hook for the exam! There are NO make-up exams. If you miss an exam for an excused reason, a score will be computed for the missing exam based on the mean of all your other exams and you will be graded using that curve for the entire class. The effect of a missing exam will be to increase the eight of the remaining exams.

Course Web-site

There is no textbook currently available which is suitable for a course at this level. The more advanced textbooks are very expensive and you would be using them primarily for the illustrations. To provide illustrative and other supplementary material, I have set up this web-site. It would be to your advantage to visit it on a regular basis as the material posted here has the same weight as text reading assignments would in other courses.

E-mail Policy

Trivial use of e-mail can quickly result in a significant burden at my end. In order to keep the mail volume to a reasonable level, the following subject areas are not acceptable subjects for e-mail correspondence:

• Routine Lecture Questions. I begin every lecture with the opportunity to ask questions on previous material and I am open to questions during the course of each lecture. If you review your notes on a regular basis, there is no reason not to ask your question during lecture. In this way, the answers to student questions benefit all students, including yourself!

• Requests for Appointments. I almost always arrive 15-20 minutes prior to lecture and I don't leave until I have dealt with any students who wish to talk with me. There is ample opportunity to make appointments or handle routine administrative matters. The only exception to this policy is the use of e-mail to make an appointment to discuss grades (see Exam Scores/Grades below) when the twerm is over

• Missed Lectures. It is your responsibility to attend all lectures and take comprehensive notes. Since I do not take attendance in lecture, there is no penalty, beyond missed information, for failing to attend a lecture. However, since lecture material makes up the bulk of the material that will appear on your exams, it would be wise to get caught-up if circumstances force you to miss one or more lecture sessions. I would thus advise all of you to network with fellow classmates to cover such situations. .

• Exam Scores/Grades. Questions with respect to exam scores and grades should be dealt with face-to-face, either prior to or after lectures or during office hours. I will provide score data via e-mail but I will NOT discuss grades, borderline or otherwise. For grade discussion, you will have to come to my office.

COURSE GRADE POLICY

After every semester, I am contacted by students who want me to reconsider their grade because they are within a few points of the cut-off for the next grade. Grade borderlines are a fact of life with any frequency distribution. If I were to change the cut-off to help those that are close to the line, I would simply create a whole new population of borderline students! The few points you might have needed for the next grade could have been earned at any point in the term! I will have reminded you about this fact several times during the semester.

All grades are final unless a mathematical or procedural error occurred in the process of grade determination. There will be no exceptions to this policy!. Any actual errors will be corrected promptly but requests for changes based on borderline status will not be honored. If such requests arrive via e-mail, the request will be deleted and there will be no reply! If you think that an error has been made, point out the nature of the problem as you see it and I will advise you as to what action will be taken. Please be aware that this error-correction policy is universal, applying to issued grades that are either too high or too low relative to the final grade curve. What this means is:

• If I make an error that gives you a grade lower than your standing on the curve, the error will be corrected.

• If I make an error that gives you a grade higher than your standing on the curve, the error will be corrected.

WEB PAGE AVAILABILITY

The course web site is maintained on my own server, at considerable effort, to enhance student learning. I make every effort to assure that the site is functional, but it is certainly possible for the site to go down, either due to campus/building network problems or due to simple over-loading of the server. The latter is most likely to occur immediately prior to exams when students who have not kept up with assignments attempt to access the material at the last minute. If the server does go down during the term, I will typically have in back on-line at the start of the next business day. However, if the server goes down on the night prior to an exam, you are out of luck! The situation is analogous to books placed on reserve in the library. If you check out the material on a regular basis, you typically will have no problems. However, if you were to try to get reserve material right before an exam, it might not be available. The web site operates the same way. If you keep up-to-date through the term, you should have no problems, but you should expect that problems might occur if you put things off until the last minute!
 
 

Ralph E. Taggart (taggart@pilot.msu.edu)