Saves or “Power Ups”

Remember our discussion of video game logic for this course. Each student receives by default three saves, or power ups. You may earn them as you go, although we will not tell you in advance how you might get them. If and when you get them, we will tell you.

You can use the saves to make up for various things according to the following scheme:

4 saves:

1. ‣ raise your final course grade by one notch, that is, from B to B+ or B+ to A-.
   

3 saves:

1. ‣ become eligible for an assignment you hadn’t been eligible for before
   

2. ‣raise your grade on one paper by one notch
   

3. ‣raise your blogging grade by one notch
   

4. ‣raise your group project grade by one notch
   

5. ‣raise your section participation grade by one notch
   

2 saves:

1. ‣ make up for two blog comments
   

2. ‣make up for one reading quiz
   

3. ‣make up for one missed discussion section
   

1 save:

1. ‣ make up for one missed lecture
   

Alternate Path to Passing This Course, or Bailing without Failing

Things don’t always work out the way you hope, and you might discover at some point during the semester that you are doing as well as you had hoped. It might be you committed to writing two papers but didn’t get around to the second, or you realized blogging is not your forte, despite the heavy weight you put on it. If you feel you are at serious risk, or if your GSI files an Academic Progress Report with your LSA advisor, indicating he or she worries about you, you may consider an alternate path for passing this course. It allows you to cut your losses, but it will also cost you quite a lot in terms of grade. And you’ll still need to do a lot of work.

Here are the requirements of the alternate path:

1. ‣Your GSI must approve your taking this alternate path.
   

2. ‣You need to commit to attending the remaining lectures and sections.
   

3. ‣You need to produce or revise some piece of substantive work (revise an essay, write a blog post, for example).
   

4. ‣You need to write a short reflective essay on your learning in the course, on a prompt assigned by your GSI
   

Satisfactory work on this alternate path only guarantees passing the course; the highest possible grade you can expect if you resort to this path is a B-.

Academic integrity

Engaging in academic work is a tricky business. On the one hand, it is important that individuals do the work that is assigned to them, even if it means reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, all scholars stand on the shoulders of others — in other words, all meaningful academic work is collaborative in one way or another — so it is sometimes hard to draw the line.

There is another reason why citations are so prevalent in academic writing. For all their bloviating, academics are a modest bunch, and when they “Joe Schmoe says this,” they think it’s possible they’ve gotten Joe’s idea all wrong. So they want to give their readers a chance to get it out for themselves.

Putting this simply, the idea of citations in academic work is to

1. (1) give credit where credit is due, and
   

2. (2) allow the reader to check things out and pursue things further.
   

That’s why us academics take the practices of proper citation extremely seriously. If you engage in any form of academic misconduct, you will automatically fail this course. And that is only the first part. As the LSA Academic Judiciary Manual of Procedures specifies, a student may be expelled from the university for academic misconduct. So that we’re clear on this, for the purposes of this class, plagiarism will mean

submitting a piece of work  which in part or in whole is not entirely the student's own work without attributing those same portions to their correct source.

Meeting the learning objectives in this course requires that you apply your current knowledge and skills to the questions and exercises and, through them, improve that knowledge and those skills. Shortcuts won’t get you there, however appealing they might seem. Because of this, the use of commercial study guides such as Cliff Notes, Sparknotes.com, and other similar resources outside this course counts as academic misconduct. Using such resources will count as academic misconduct. (They also won’t do you any good in this course.)

Grade grievances

If you think you have been graded unfairly on any given assignment or component, you will need to do the following:

1. 1.Wait 24 hours after receiving the grade before approaching the GSI.
   

2. 2.Provide an explanation in writing for why the grade you received was unfair.
   

3. 3.If you are unsatisfied with your GSI’s response, you may write an appeal to the professor. This appeal must include your original explanation to the GSI and a written explanation for why it is unfair.
   

Departmental grade grievance procedures are outlined on the political science website on advising.

Finally, read about the general course logistics >>