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Announcements:
·The Key to the Third Midterm has been posted here.
·Lecture Topics REVISED 10/13
·Quiz Answer keys are posted here.
·Beginning September 24th, Section 114 (Wed 2-3 pm) moves from 2032 VLSB to 2038 VLSB
·Waitlisted students: Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee you a spot in the course and must give first priority to MCB and IB seniors who need this class to graduate. You are welcome to continue on the waiting list, but it may be prudent to investigate other options. If you are a graduating senior in MCB or IB and need this course to graduate, please see the staff advisors in your respective departmental office.
·Students with a conflicting/competing midterm(s) between this class and another class (e.g. a midterm given at the same or overlapping time as our course) must contact Professor Amacher as soon as possible. She needs to know the name of the other course and the conflicting midterm time and date. If you came up after class on Monday, September 8th, you do not need to notify her again. No make-up exams will be given, but we are trying to work something out with the competing courses that might allow you to take both midterms.
Lecture:
MWF 9 AM, 2050 VLSB
Discussion sections:
Please consult TeleBears for sections and times. Sections will NOT be held during first week of class. You must be enrolled in a discussion section and stay with that section throughout the course. Short quizzes given in Discussion Sections and your discussion participation will determine 10% of your grade (50 points). The lowest of your five quiz scores will be dropped. The Graduate Student Instructors will confer to assure that each section gets the same number of quizzes of comparable difficulty, but with different questions.
Prerequisites
Biology 1A-1B or consent of instructor. Recommended: Chem. 3A-3B.
Textbooks
Hartwell et al, Genetics: From Genes to Genomes, Third edition. McGraw Hill (required). The Solutions manual is recommended.
Exam Policies
There will be two evening (2 hr) midterm exams, worth 150 points each, and a 150 point final exam. The exams are as noncumulative as we can make them, though there will inevitably be concepts learned during the early part of the course that are needed to understand later parts of the course. The exams count equally to make up 90% of your grade. The other 10% comes from the quizzes taken in discussion sections (40 pts) and from your GSI's evaluation of your participation in section (10 pts).
The first midterm exam will be held the evening of Monday, October 6th from 6-8pm.
The second midterm exam will be held the evening of Thursday, November 6th from 7-9pm.
The final exam is the morning of Friday, December 19th from 8-11 am (Exam Group 16).
Work that is illegible or in any other way ambiguous will be given a zero. Cheating will not be tolerated. Anyone suspected of cheating will immediately be referred to the Office of Student Conduct, and official reports will be added to the student's academic record.
There will be no makeup exams. If you have a valid reason to miss a midterm exam, it is your responsibility to inform your instructor as soon as possible, in writing, preferably before the exam, but no later than two days after the exam. Examples of acceptable excuses are incapacitating illness or death in the immediate family, with a doctor's note; a career-related interview, with a note from a prospective school or employer; or a serious traffic accident, with a police report. A standardized exam, such as the MCAT or GRE, is an acceptable excuse only when the standardized exam occurs at the same time as the MCB142 midterm. Scheduling conflicts with exams in other courses are not an acceptable excuse.
If you are excused from a midterm exam, your grade will be determined by your scores on the other two exams, relative to the average grades on those exams. You may not be excused from both midterm exams. If you miss the final exam, a grade of Incomplete may be assigned, at the discretion of the instructor. To receive an Incomplete, the reason for the missed final must have been beyond the control of the student, and the student must be earning a C- grade or better in the course. The student is responsible for making all the arrangements in writing with Professor Amacher.
Grades
An Academic Senate guideline suggested that honor grades of plain B or above should be given to no more than half the class. In practice, the mean score in this class divides B from B-.
Regrade Procedures
This course has over 300 students. In the process of grading so many exams, it is always possible that errors or omissions were made. The readers will correct such errors if the following guidelines are followed: If your score was summed incorrectly, even by 1 point, simply attach a note and resubmit it. If you wrote your exam in pencil or erasable ink, or it was corrected with liquid paper, you can only resubmit it to be totaled again; your answers will not be re-evaluated.
If you feel that you received too few points, attach a cover sheet to your exam explaining why those answers should be re-evaluated. Please read the posted key carefully and address the differences between your answer and the key. Your explanation should not be longer than one page. Read your answer carefully. Is your handwriting legible? Is your answer understandable? Read it aloud to yourself to be certain that the answer you were thinking of when you took the exam is actually what ended up on the page. Answers that only imply the correct solution, but do not clearly state it are often given only partial credit. The student may have understood the concept thoroughly, but not demonstrated that understanding in the answer.
Do not submit a regrade request for fewer than 2 points. At the end of the semester, the difference between letter grades will not be less than 2 points, so you won't be improving your final grade. A regrade is a complete re-evaluation of your entire exam - even questions you did not ask to be reconsidered. Since some grading errors result in too many points being awarded, it is possible for you to lose points by requesting a regrade. Some exams may be photocopied. You have one week from the day the exams are returned to submit for a regrade. The only exception is a medical excuse for the entire week. Extra Credit
To encourage you to become more familiar with the research literature, we offer you the chance to benefit from an extra credit project that might help your final grade if you are just below a grade border. This project is entirely optional and cannot hurt you (nor does it affect the curve). The project is to select two primary research papers in genetics to read with understanding, evidence of which you will provide by writing a one-paragraph summary of each. At least one of the papers must have been published in 2008. The summaries should not just paraphrase the paper's own abstract and should include some brief indication of why you chose these particular papers and your reactions to or evaluations of the papers. You will turn in these summaries at the start of the final exam. If your course total places you just below the boundary between two grades (i.e. D/C-; C/C+ or A-/A), we will look at your summary. If your summary is clear, well written, and cogent, we will award you the higher grade. Inspiration for your choices of papers can come from many places, such as reviews like the Annual Review of Genetics, Trends in Genetics, and Scientific American, or the tables of contents of the genetically-oriented research journals such as Genetics, Genes and Development, or Development, to name just a few The papers you report on, however, must be primary research papers, not reviews. A good approach is to pick a single recent paper of interest to you, then pick an additional paper from among the literature that is cited therein.
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