Instructor: Bill Lamberts

Office: SC 353

Office phone: 363-3160

E-mail: wlamberts@csbsju.edu

General expectations:

Attendance: Please be on time to class, as entering the room late disturbs your classmates and professor. We will not be taking attendance, but we expect you to come to class if you want to do well in this course. Lab attendance is, of course, mandatory.

Reading: We expect you to read the assigned material before class.

Respect: If the classroom is to be a place to learn, your classmates need to be able to pay attention without distraction. Extraneous conversations during class are distracting to me too.

Communication: Please feel welcome to ask questions during class if you need us to clarify something. We need to know how you're doing during class, and your feedback will help us teach better.

Exams: Please take the exams on the days they are scheduled. Make-ups are difficult to arrange, but if you truly can't make an exam, it is your responsibility to get in touch with us about it. If you suspect you may miss an exam, you must let us know in advance.

Office hours:

My office hours will be posted here as soon as we decide when they should be. Please feel free to make appointments with us if these times don't work for you.

Extra credit:

The Biology Department will be sponsoring seminars throughout the semester. You can get extra credit for this course by attending them and handing in a one page write-up of the seminar. A good write-up must include:

• the name of the seminar and the speaker
• the main point(s) of the seminar (the questions or problems the speaker raised)
• some idea as to how the topic was investigated
• the general conclusion(s) the speaker made.

Write-ups will be due before each exam. To see the seminar schedule click here.

Homework:

I will try to assign homework during each section of this course. They will be counted towards your exam grade. That means that an exam worth 14% of your final grade would be worth only 13% if you do the homework, the other 1% being your homework. It pays to do your homework carefully! If you don't do it at all, you will get a zero for one-fourteenth of your exam. Grades for homework handed in late will have 10% taken off for each day it is late.

A word about grading:

The question I ask myself when I grade an assignment is, "Have they proved to me that they understand the material?" This means that you have to read exam questions carefully so that you really address what it is I want you to tell me about. It also means that a good answer is not just true, it is also relevant to the question.