For those students taking courses for letter grades:
There is a first take home paper assignment (3 pages) worth 15% of your grade. There is a midterm exam worth 25% of your grade. Then there is the final paper and final exam, worth 30% each.
The breakdown is therefore as follows:
First Writing assignment 15% of grade
Midterm 25% of grade
First Paper 30% of grade
Final Paper 30% of grade
100%
How will your work be evaluated?
1) In the papers I shall grade you firstly on your basic paper writing skills. Spelling, grammar, a thesis statement, a conclusion, and a lucid and well-organized and well-argued paper will help communicate your ideas clearly. Secondly, the ideas themselves, in as much as they are clearly presented, will also be an equally important determining factor. In this I look for the sophistication of the ideas, evidence that the skills pertaining to the analysis of art have been seriously considered, and so on. See below for more information on paper assignments.
2) The exams will have some short answer sections and a few identifications (these will be very straightforward), but the short and longer essay format will be a major part of the grades of the exams. Here, you need to clearly and concisely address the problem or question at hand, integrating as much relevant information from lectures and readings as you can in the time provided. Students who demonstrate mastery of analytic skills of art and the ability to bring in relevant historical or contextual information will usually get the higher grades.
A Note on Excuses-Course Policies:
1) Missed an Exam: If you are sick be sure to go to the doctor and get a note. You should do that anyway since the doctor can help you get better and make sure your illness is just a cold and not something worse. If your parents are local, or you've gone home to get some TLC that's OK too, get them to write a note with their names and phone number on it. Drastic family illness and death in the family are also, of course, valid excuses. Especially in these sensitive cases, please do not put me in the position of having to ask for documentation. I want to respect your privacy but I also have a duty to be fair to the students as a group. Have one of your parents make a brief note and send it to me. Cars breaking down, malfunctioning alarm clocks, work-scheduling problems, etc. etc. will not be considered valid excuses. Don't promise to get a note, get one, and keep a copy of it yourself just in case. There are no make up exams except for those who have documented excuses. If you miss an exam for any other reason, you forfeit that entire percentage of your grade.
2) Handing Papers in Late: Same rules as above apply. There is some flexibility, however. For the first paper you will lose a grade every day your paper is late up to three days, after which you may hand in a paper that will only be give a 'Pass' grade. So if the paper is due Wednesday and you get it in Thursday and it is a B+ paper, you will get a B. If the paper is due Thursday, you must get it in by Friday, since Monday would put you over the limit of late days allowed. For the final paper you may hand the paper in one day late and lose one grade (from C+, for example, to C). After that, again, the papers will be 'Pass' or 'Fail' grades. Late paper excuses generally revolve around computers malfunctioning and crashing or things not being saved properly. Always frequently save your work on a floppy disk while working. To avoid formatting problems try as much as you can not to change computers. Try also to avoid word processing on one computer and then going to another to print.
Policy on Cheating:
Hey, it happens. Cheating takes two forms in a course, cheating on exams (by crib sheet, pre-prepared answers, or copying another's work) and paper plagiarism.
1) If caught with any kind of crib sheet or referring to notes in an exam situation you will receive a 'Fail' on the exam. If you usually wear a cap take it off or turn the visor back.
2) Plagiarism is using somebody else's ideas for a paper and passing them off as your own, or using somebody else's idea or words and not letting your reader know, through a footnote or endnote, where you got the information. As you know, there are conventions for doing footnotes, so you should follow these rules if you do use information from a book or article. A more probable scenario in this course is two students turning in the same paper or two roommates working too closely together on a topic so that the papers are too similar. Studying together is one thing, sharing a few too many ideas is another. Be careful with this. Be an independent thinker!
