Phys 3/491:  Jr/Sr. Seminar                          

Policies and Expectations

Objectives:

Text: The Craft of Scientific Writing (3^rd edition) by Michael Alley will be a resource for both Junior and Senior – seminar participants.  Of course, this means that participants in the Senior Seminar are already familiar with the book from when you took Junior Seminar, but you’ll probably find that, now you have a significant document you’re working on, it’s well worth reviewing.

Teams: The Junior and Senior Seminars enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Participants in the two seminars have distinct but related goals and roles.  Much of your work will be structured around teams consisting of one senior and two juniors; each of you will be on two teams.  I’ll assign them based on shared research interests.  Many class periods will be devoted to working in these teams.  Early in the semester, the Seniors will select readings (relevant to their research) that their teams will digest and critique.  Aside from honing everyone’s eye for the elements of good (and bad) scientific communication, this will also prepare the Junior team members for their role later in the semester – reviewing drafts of the Seniors’ Theses.

Parts and Points:  The following description of your grade’s composition more generally gives you a sense of the course’s composition.  

Class meetings (20%):  Much of the work that you’ll do for this course will be done in class, so it’s essential that you come prepared and contribute your share to the team’s work during the class-time team meetings.

Practice with Scientific Writing Craft:  Alley’s text gives valuable guidance for writing and critiquing. Of course, it takes practice to internalize these lessons.  
            Exercises (12%): For many of the chapters, you’ll get practice on focused exercise worksheets in small working groups during class. 
            Critiques (12%):  In these same working groups, you’ll also apply Alley’s criteria to critique selected scientific readings.

Overviews (5%):  The articles on which you’ll practice applying Alley’s criteria will actually be selected by the seniors on your teams and will be relevant to their theses.  So juniors are prepared to offer informed feedback on their thesis drafts, later in the semester, they’ll want to understand these articles well.  To that end, with the guidance and input of the seniors on each team, the juniors will write brief overviews of each article they read. 

Outlines & Drafts (20%):  A strong thesis, research proposal, or application does not get generated from scratch and in one pass – it takes planning and refining.  So you’ll be asked to produce outlines and drafts of your work along the way.  An additional benefit is that your colleagues will be able to provide you valuable feedback on your works in progress.  To facilitate this, share your work in .pdf format; the latest free version of Adobe Acrobat has handy tools for placing comments on documents.  Group discussions will often be based on your work so failing to turn in your work on time will adversely affect the rest of the class. Late assignments will receive an initial penalty of 20% and a penalty of 10% for each additional day late.

Major Written Works: 

Seniors – Thesis (15%):  Ultimately, participants in the Senior Seminar will produce a Senior Thesis.  Aside from being an end in its own rights, as the culminating works of these seminars, they should reflect your mastery of (written) scientific communication.  If you desire (and any collaborators consent), your thesis will be published through the Armacost Library online; as the author, you will receive subsequent readership notices.

Juniors – Summer Application (5%) & Research Proposal (10%): The Summer Application serves two purposes.  First, research experience is an essential component of an undergraduate physics education, so the Junior Seminar provides an occasion for you to explore and apply for positions.  Second, regardless of one’s educational or career path, a lot can ride on an application, so it’s important to get practice with this medium.  The process of creating the Research Proposal should put you in good stead for having a solid thesis come this time next year; also, the document itself is your culminating work in Junior Seminar and should reflect your mastery of (written) scientific communication. 

Presentations:  Oral presentation is a key mode of communication in the sciences, and it has constraints and corresponding guidelines of its own.  Aside from getting practice crafting and delivering an oral presentation of your work (thesis for the Sr. Sem. and research proposal for the Jr. Sem.), presenting to a live audience gives you invaluable insight into what does and doesn’t communicate well, and thus will help you be able to improve your written work as well.

Seniors: Initial Research Update Presentation (2%); First Thesis Segment (2%); Rough Rehearsal (2%); Dress Rehearsal (4%); Final Presentation (6%)

Juniors: Where Physics Fits Presentation (2%); Applying and Plans Presentation (3%); Research Proposal Presentation (6%)

Juniors:  Sample Physics GRE (5%):  There are two reasons this is included in Jr. Seminar.  First, many physics graduate programs require that students take the Physics GRE, and it takes  more time and effort to prepare for than many expect, so you’ll appreciate why it’s important to prepare over the summer, it’s a good idea to sample what you’d be up against before it’s too late.  Second, it provides an opportunity for you to pause, look back over the different physics courses you’ve taken (this sampling will only really draw from Gen Phys I-III), review it, and see it as a cohesive whole; that will strengthen your foundation for the courses you take next year.  

Sr. Presentations: On Monday, March 30^th around 4 p.m., the seniors will give a presentation of their work for the department. Dinner will be served after the presentations. Regardless of whether you’re presenting, you’re required to attend; if you are not presenting, you will be taking notes so you can provide valuable feedback to the presenters later.

Grades: will be evaluated based on the following:

Plagiarism:  Plagiarism has the potential undermine the educational process in almost any type of course, but it is particularly hazardous in these seminars which, more than any other physics courses, focus on developing your skills for communicating scientific material.  So the following discussion is a tad more detailed than in my typical syllabus.

Regardless of whether it is properly cited, excessive use of another’s language, diagrams, chain of reasoning, sequence of equation, etc. reduces your opportunity to hone your own skills, which is the aim of this class.  Beyond that, if you’d fail to identify borrowed content as having been produced by another, i.e. plagiarize, I wouldn’t have been able to accurately evaluate of your skills.  So, aside from the moral issue of not giving credit where credit is due, it is for this pragmatic reason –  that plagiarism masks excessive use of another’s work (and thus insufficient work of one’s own) – that it cannot be tolerated in this class.  So, I will be apt to drop from the course a person I detect plagiarizing.  This is not because he or she has done a ‘bad’ thing and is a ‘bad’ person; it is because I will no longer be able to count on any of his/her work to accurately reflect progress toward one of the central goals of the course – in as material a way as if the student had scheduling conflict, this course simply wouldn’t ‘work’ for him/her.

Here is a brief summary of the school’s policy; you can see the Catalog for more details.  Instructors are to report to the Registrar’s office all incidents of plagiarism; the report does not become part of the student’s permanent record, but is retained as long as the student is at Redlands.  The student may appeal the identification of plagiarism to the Academic Review Board (ARB.)  For the first incident of plagiarism that is logged with the Registrar, the instructor decides the sanction (note: the ARB can dismiss a case of plagiarism, but if the case stands, no one but the instructor can decide the sanction for a first incident.)  For subsequent incidents, the ARB decides the sanction as they, and not the instructor, have access to the previous reports and thus can place the new incident in proper context.