Course Requirements and Grading:
Class meetings will be devoted to a
combination of lectures and discussion of the current readings.
The readings serve to raise relevant questions about the topics
to be covered. There are no textbooks for the course.
Rather, the readings are available on reserve in the Earth
Sciences Library, in the
Other requirements of the course include completion of the in-class examination and writing four (4) short papers. The exam is scheduled Tuesday, October 8 during the regular class meeting. The exam is only given in class that day, so you must attend. The exam will be essay in form and is worth 40% of your final course grade. The other graded requirement of the course is the completion of four written papers. The papers will be 5-6 double-spaced pages that will cover two things. First, they will include a brief review of one article read for a section that summarizes or highlights the main points raised in the article. Second, you will raise a question or set of questions based on an article that you then discuss in some detail. This aspect of the paper is the most difficult, but potentially the most rewarding. You must get in the habit of reading the articles with a questioning mind and thinking about the ways in which the article relates to the topics under consideration. Five papers are assigned, but you will only be graded on 4. That means you may either decide not to write on a topic or you may drop the grade on a paper. Due dates for the papers are noted on the course schedule. The must be turned in during that class period, because the class meeting will be devoted to discussion of them. You may not turn in a paper if you do not attend the class meeting. Each paper is worth 15% of the final course grade for a total of 60%. When you turn in the papers, I would like a hard copy and a disk copy. The disk copy will be checked against an Internet bank of papers for plagiarism.
There are two exceptions to the weights assigned to the exam and the papers. The first is failure to take the exam. If you do not take the exam, you fail the course. The exam, then, is a requirement in the true sense of the term. Second, if I find that you cheated or plagiarized, you fail the course. Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. If you have questions about plagiarism when you write your papers, contact me. Please refer to the campus honor code for questions about academic dishonesty.
To recap, under normal circumstances, grades will be assigned as follows:
Midterm 40%
Papers (4 at 15%) 60%
There will be an opportunity for extra
credit work. This course is being offered as part of a
teaching consortium focused on immigration, race, and
ethnocentrism; the consortium links four universities in the