Honors 100 - First Year Seminar - The Nature and Practice of Science

Grades will be determined as follows:

• Class participation (10%): Did you do all you should have to prepare for the day's activities? Were your assignments (both final and intermediate drafts) done on time? We will give each student a grade each day on our assessment of how well she did the work required. We will also learn how to use the resources of the internet and there will be graded activities associated with these skills.
• Discussion (30%): Did you actually take part in the discussions? Did you learn all of the skills necessary to succeed in a discussion format? Again, we will grade discussion often - in most cases grading particular discussion skills. We will announce these graded discussions before they happen. (Of course, most every day will involve some small group or class discussion.) Faculty will wander about and listen and if required answer specific questions but, in general, will not be a part of your discussions.
  
• Speeches (15%): In addition to practice and "draft" speeches, there will be 1 or 2 individual graded presentations. These activities will account for virtually all of the speech grade.
• Writing (40%): This grade will be based on your 6 graded papers. Note that papers will not be equally weighted. In particular, the end of the semester research paper will be worth more than the other papers.
• Information Literacy/Library/Grammar Assignments (5%): There will be some graded exercises where we will have you find source materials about some assigned topic or do some other tasks associated with retrieving or evaluating information sources.
  

You should understand that the critical reading part of the grade will be absorbed into both the class participation grade and the discussion grade. (After all, you cannot do a proper job discussing a text you have not read carefully.)

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