Class Policies
Please do your own work
Modern science is collaborative, and people learn from talking to each other. Feel free to talk to your instructors and to other students about assignments. However, the work you turn in must be your own — do not copy assignments, or take credit for work done by someone else. Copying is considered cheating, and will be be handled according to university policy.
Participation
There is a large demand for the limited number of spaces in this class, and we need to treat those who are hoping to join fairly. If you fail to complete the pre-class survey within the first week of the semester, I will assume that you do not intend to participate in this class, and apply an administrative drop to free up a space for another student. If three assignments are not turned in and you have not contacted me, or if you do not take the midterm examination, I will assume that you are no longer attending class and will again apply an administrative drop.
Communication
The bulk of the material for this course is presented online, and can be found from the class home page.
Your instructor has office hours posted on the class home page. You are welcome to drop by in person at these times, to meet us and to discuss your questions. It is always nice to attach a face to a name, so if you find yourself in the vicinity of Science A, please do come by to introduce yourself.
It can be easy to be misunderstood when using electronic communication methods, so we have a few ground rules to help keep matters civil.
- Do not CAPITALIZE ENTIRE MESSAGES FOR ADDED IMPACT. This is commonly interpreted as shouting, and is harder to read than well-punctuated text.
- If your message is longer than a few sentences, break it into separate paragraphs so that it is easier to follow.
- Once you have written a note, re-read it for clarity before posting it, Use a spell-checker, and make sure that you define your terms properly. (Write "lecture 4, on the phases of the Moon", rather than "today's lecture".) Ask yourself whether your note would make sense to you if you read it in a week, and if not, then revise it before sending it.
- If you disagree with something another person has written, be polite, and focus on the subject matter rather than the individual. (Write "I think that you may have missed a factor of 100 when converting from centimeters to meters" rather than "You're an idiot!")
- If you send an e-mail, begin with a salutation ("Dear Professor Campbell," or "Hello Ryan,"), state your concern politely with enough details to make your point, and then close with your name ("Sincerely, Annie Jump Cannon"). If you don't sign your e-mails, we won't know who you are!
Assignments
Keep careful track of the work to be done each week from the course web page for assignments. This is probably the most useful web page for this course.
In order to keep track of all of the work that you submit you need to clearly label every assignment (laboratory reports, exams, and extra credit write-ups) with your full name.
Pre-Class and Post-Class Surveys
You will be asked to fill out two short online surveys for this class, one at the beginning and one at the end of the semester. We will ask you a few questions about your background, and about how you interacted with various resources provided to you for this class.
The survey information is used to explain to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) agency how the materials for this class are being used to help students. NASA is interested in stimulating an interest in science and in education in your generation, and is generously funding us to develop all of the materials used for this course (such the self-review library and the laboratory exercise computer software and video tutorials).
Quiz and Homework Assignments
Quizzes and homework assignments are are conducted through the self-review library. This is an online archive of 11,000+ astronomy questions, grouped according to our 26 lecture modules. It has its own FAQ, and you should read through it.
You should begin your studies each week by reading through the lecture slides for the week and listening to audio recordings of the lectures from a previous semester. Then log into the self-review library, and start working through practice (review mode) quizzes of those lectures for your homework. The point of attempting problems on each topic is to strengthen your understanding of the material, so don't be disappointed if your scores start out low — they will rise as you learn. Take at least 20 review quizzes each week, to fully explore the questions for those lectures in the library archive.
Your homework grade will be calculated two ways, and you will receive the higher of the two scores. Your default homework score is your average score on the review quizzes. However, we want you to study freely without worrying about your scores. One point of having such a large archive of questions is to allow students who are having difficulty with a topic to work through problems at their own pace, until they are comfortable with the material. If you take an average of at least 20 review quizzes per week, your second homework score will be 100%. If you take at least 18 quizzes per week, it will be 90%, for 16-17 quizzes it will be 80%, for 14-15 quizzes it will be 70%, and for 12-13 quizzes per week it will be 60%. You will receive the higher of your average score on your review quizzes and your second homework score, as your homework grade. As long as you average at least 20 review quizzes per week, your homework score will be 100%.
Once you have taken at least 20 review quizzes and your average scores on them are 80 to 100%, then you should be ready for your weekly graded quiz. Select the weekly quiz option, to receive a quiz for a quiz grade. This quiz will be drawn from the same large set of questions, so if you have reviewed the material thoroughly you should have no surprises. Keep in mind that there are at least 40 different types of questions on every lecture. If you find yourself being surprised by questions that come up on your weekly quiz, then you are not doing enough review work in preparation. The key difference between a weekly graded quiz and a review quiz is that you will no longer have links embedded in each question pointing back to the lecture slides or offering hints for the problems.
Each weekly quiz can be taken once; the 16 weekly quizzes will be averaged to form your quiz grade. You can check your progress against that of previous student cohorts by clicking on the "Progress Report" button when requesting a new quiz.
You can conduct review on any lecture at any time. The weekly quizzes are available for a period of three weeks. You can thus take them a week early, during the week of the semester where the key lectures are covered, or (in emergencies) up to a week late. The best policy is to take each quiz during the week that it is covered &mdash you do not want to fall behind the material. We extend the time window in which each quiz can be taken a full week in either direction to cover travel, illness, and accidents, so take your quizzes in a timely fashion so that you do not end up with scores of zero. The final deadlines are on Saturday evenings each week, at 10pm.
When you sit down to work through problems in the self-review library, bring a calculator and choose a quiet location where you will not be disturbed. Do not keep a television or radio on at the same time, and do not play with social media in another browser window on your computer. Do not work when you are too tired to stay awake, or if you are under the influence of alcohol.
Every semester one or two students "discover" that if they begin a weekly, graded quiz and lose their nerve, they can kill their browser window rather than submitting their answers, study some more, and then return and take a second shot at the graded quiz. They think that they are getting away with cherry-picking their quizzes, but in fact every time anyone does this a large red flag is raised next to their name in the self-review library records. Please don't try this — it is no fun for your instructor to call you on the carpet for taking an unfair advantage of other students by not respecting the even playing field. This option exists for the rare case where a student begins a graded quiz and then loses power or internet conductivity, or has an emergency. If you do this once in the semester, we'll let it slide, but if it re-occurs we'll set the affected weekly quiz scores to zero to be fair to your peers.
A complete record of your quiz work is preserved within the library archive for your instructor. You may make an appointment to review your work with them in person, if you find that helpful.
Lab Assignments
The lab portion of this class will be based on ~13 total labs. The PHYX 104 laboratory will meet in Science A 374. There are lab sections on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 19:00-21:50. In addition to the in-class lab work, a lab summary must be written up each week. These should cover the salient topics of each week's lab, and make sure to address the questions at the back of each lab. Your lab reports must then be turned at the beginning of lab the following week. The Lab reports will be posted to the class webpage every week before lab. On several clear nights over the course of the semester we will eschew our normal lab routine for a trip up to the observatory. Because clear weather is such a rarity in Humboldt county, we'll arrange travel logistics on a case by case basis. For these labs, you will be responsible for turning in a summary of the objects that we observe in place of your normal lab report. The other difficulty is logistics. If the weather looks pretty good, I will email the lab section through moodle by 5 PM. Everybody will then meet up at the observatory instead of SA 374. If you think transportation will be a problem, or if you have a spot in your car, meet up here after class to arrange for ride-sharing.
Exams
We will hold two exams for this course, a midterm exam from 15:00 - 15:50 October 20 and a final exam from 12:40 - 14:30 on December 15. Both Exams meet in NR 101.
There may be a few people who cannot attend one of the exams. If you are one of those people, you will need to contact your instructor immediately to arrange for an alternate plan.
Grading
The final course grades will be on a curve, but if you have more than 88% of the total number of points available you will receive at least an A, 78 to 87% at least a B, and 68 to 78% at least a C. You must earn a C or better to receive a Satisfactory rating if you have opted for the S/U option.
An incomplete will be given only when a student has a C grade or better at the time the incomplete is requested and cannot complete the class due to circumstances beyond her/his control. These circumstances must have developed after the last day to withdraw from the class. Appropriate circumstances include a documented illness, death or crisis in the student's immediate family. Job-related problems are not appropriate grounds.
You will have one week from the time an assignment is returned to bring up any perceived errors. There are (rarely!) occasions when grading errors occur, so you should review your work carefully.
Textbook
The textbook for this course is recommended, but not required. You are welcome to purchase a copy, but it is not mandatory. We strongly recommend that the following types of people obtain a copy.
- Students who strongly prefer reading printed books to reading from a computer screen
- Students for whom English is a second or third language, or who have no background in science, who may benefit from more detailed descriptions of new concepts
- Physics majors who are considering completing a minor degree in astronomy
You may feel free to substitute another general astronomy textbook at the college level, if one is available to you. Simply read the chapters with titles that match the topics under discussion in our course each week. You might also consider working through your homework and quizzes for the first few lectures, and completing your first laboratory exercises, and then deciding whether you need a separate reference text.
If you are determined to secure a copy of the recommended textbook but find it a hardship to purchase one, please come by office hours to discuss your situation. We can help.
SSD
If you have a disability that interferes with your academic progress, please contact the Student Disability Resource Center for an appointment to discuss accommodation.