BIOLOGY 6650 Animal Behavior FALL 2009

Graduate Student Syllabus

See the undergraduate version of the syllabus, available from the course web site, for those items that apply to all students, undergraduate and graduate, who take this course. The present document describes additional requirements for graduate students only.

As described in the general syllabus, all students can accumulate up to 580 points from the lecture exams (300 points), essays (50 points), term paper/project (100 points) and lab assignments (130 points). Grades for graduate students will be based on an additional 150 points due to the following requirements:

1. In-class presentation: Each graduate student must present one lecture during the semester or develop and oversee a lab exercise. If a lecture, it must use the full class time. The topic and date for the presentation must be approved in advance by me. Scheduling of the presentation will be determined by how the topic fits within other material being covered in the course. You must decide on your topic no later than the end of the 3^rd week of class (September 3). You must provide me with a detailed outline of the lecture or lab procedure at least 1 week before your presentation. You are strongly encouraged to be creative by incorporating Powerpoint, web sites etc. into your presentation. Let me know if you need any help with this. All students will be responsible for the material you cover, so it is critical you work hard at making your points clear and easy to follow.

Your lecture will be worth 50 points and will be evaluated for both content and clarity of presentation.

2. Current literature review: Beginning Tuesday, August 28, you must submit a 1 page summary of an article from the scientific literature that relates to topics discussed during the previous week’s lectures. This summary should describe the basic points of the paper (IN YOUR OWN WORDS – a summary does not consist of lifting phrases directly from the paper itself) and how it relates to the issues covered in class. Ideally, most of these papers should be up-to-date, i.e., published within the last 18 months. However, if you want to use something older, check with me prior to submission to make sure it is acceptable. In all cases, you must provide the full bibliographic citation for the paper you are summarizing.

Each summary is worth 10 points. You will have 10 of these to turn in, one on each of the following dates:

1. August 25

2. September 1

3. September 8

4. September 15

5. September 29

6. October 6

7. October 13

8. October 27

9. November 10

10. November 17

Finally, be aware that, while all students are required to submit a term paper, those written by graduate students will be held to a higher standard. For example, I will not award points for each peer-reviewed reference in the bibliography as is done with undergraduate papers. I do this with undergrads in order to force them to read the scientific literature; I assume that grad students do not need such an incentive. Nonetheless, term papers will be evaluated using the same criteria applied to undergraduate papers – the criteria will just be applied a bit more rigorously.

Because of the additional requirements, graduate student grades will be based on a total of 730 points, with grades distributed according to the following percentages:

A = 657 – 730

B = 584 – 656

C = 511 – 583

D = 438 - 510