ATTENDANCE

All students are required to attend and actively participate in each lecture and laboratory session.  Excused absences may be made up during another laboratory session that same week.  You must contact the instructor (Dr. Ann Marie Daniel 865-0919 or amd9@psu.edu) or your graduate teaching assistant prior to the lab session if your absence is to be excused.  You may also leave a message with the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Office (865-5497).  For each lab missed without a legitimate excuse, your final grade will be lowered by a letter grade.

LABORATORY CONDUCT 

During the lab period, each student is expected to interact with other people and with equipment in a safe manner and as a professional.  Disregard for safety, not being prepared for the day's experiment, and lack of professionalism will not be tolerated.  For each incident of this nature, the student will receive a 5 point deduction from the final grade.  Other (not exclusive) examples of behavior that will result in 5 point reductions are:  forgetting laboratory safety goggles, tardiness, overreliance on a lab colleague for data collection, leaving lab equipment and supplies out of the desk at the end of the lab session, failure to clean glassware, carelessness or disregard of safety precautions, abuse of instrumentation, etc.

GENERAL GRADING POLICIES

1.    Type written lab reports are due at the beginning of your scheduled lab period.  The grade of those received after this time will be reduced by 10% of their total value for the first day late, i.e., reports arriving between one minute and 24 hours late will have 10% of their total value deducted.  An additional 10% will be deducted for each three days (or fraction thereof) that the report is late.  I.E., 7 days late = 30% deduction.

2.    The laboratory exercises will be graded using Lab Report Guidelines (page 4) and the specific requests provided with each project.  

3.    Anyone desiring regrading must indicate reasons in writing and resubmit the report; oral assistance in regrading is not allowed.  Regrades must be requested no later than seven days after reports are returned.  Note:  selected papers will be photocopied before returning to monitor post-submission changes.

4.    There will not be any make up exam unless prior approval is arranged.  If you are sick on the day of the exam, a doctor's note will be required stating that you were too sick to make it to the exam.  Otherwise, a missed exam constitutes a 0 value for that exam.  Make up exams may be in essay or oral form at the discretion of the instructor.

5.    Announced and/or unannounced quizzes may be given in lab or in lecture.  These quizzes are designed to test the student's preparedness for the experiments to be performed during that session and may include material from previous experiments.  There will be no make-up quizzes.  The lowest quiz grade will be dropped.

6.    At the beginning of each laboratory session, each student is required to have name, date, title, chemical reaction, and the day's experimental procedures written in a notebook.  The purpose of writing out the procedure is to prepare you for the day's experiment.  This activity will help you perform the experiments more efficiently with less confusion and mistakes and will help make the writing of lab reports easier.  A student will not be permitted to start an experiment unless the notebook is complete as stated above.

7.    Each student must write his/her lab report independently; i.e., own graphs, text, style, layout, etc.  Lab reports with the same style, graphs, fonts, text, placement, and sentence "meaning" order will be considered a collaborative lab report effort and will have 30% of the lab report evaluation deducted.

8.    Plagiarism will not be tolerated.  Individuals who copy an assignment or a lab report from another student or who aid another in copying will have 50% of that material's total point value deducted.  In addition, any individuals found to be cheating or who aid another in cheating on a quiz or exam will receive a 0 value for that quiz or exam.

Click here to see the policies separately.

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This page is maintained by Andrew Coe (andrewcoe@psu.edu) and was last updated on August 23, 2000 .  If you have any comments, questions, or corrections, please feel free to contact me.