ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Physics 234B, Fall 2008

Article 2.3.3 of the Academic Freedom Report states: “The student shares with the faculty the responsibility for maintaining the integrity of scholarship, grades, and professional standards.” In addition, the College of Natural Science adheres to the policies on academic honesty specified in General Student Regulation 1.0, Protection of Scholarship and Grades ; the all-University Policy on Integrity of Scholarship and Grades ; and Ordinance 17.00, Examinations. (See Spartan Life: Student Handbook and Resource Guide and/or the MSU Web site www.msu.edu .)

Therefore, except as explicitly specified below, you are expected to complete all course assignments, including homework, quizzes and exams, without assistance from any source. You are expected to develop original work for this course.  Also, you are not authorized to use or facilitate for others to use the www.allmsu.com Web site to complete any course work in this course. Students who violate MSU rules may receive a penalty grade, including but not limited to a failing grade on the specific assignment or in the course.

You can seek and provide assistance, including that in posts on the Loncapa site, concerning strategies in solving homework and partial-credit exam problems. You cannot give away, or seek others to give away, outright problem solutions, reducing the learning experience for a recipient of the solution to zero. E.g. you cannot post formulas on the Loncapa site that provide an answer upon subsititution. On the other hand, posting a formula is OK if you want to specify the law that should be followed and there is more to the problem than just substitution to that law. If you are in doubt whether a specific form of assistance is acceptable in homework and partial-credit exams, ask the teaching staff for the course. Posts on the Locapa site violating the policies will be removed; persistent offenders will be subjected to the penalties indicated above. Inappropriate posts on the site may be removed as well.

GRADING
Physics 234B, Fall 2008

Grading Scale:

Grading Weights:

• There are no in-class make-up midterm exams. However, each in-class midterm is followed by a partial-credit midterm solved under Loncapa. The partial-credit midterm consists of the same problems as the in-class exam, just with different data. By solving the partial-credit exam, a student can increase his score for the corresponding midterm by 21%*(partial credit score - in-class score).
• The only excuses accepted for missing an in-class exam are illness, verified in writing by a physician’s note, or a very serious family problem, verified by documentation of illness or death in the family. It is a violation of University policy to provide false information to any agent of the University for your own gain. If you are going to miss an exam, you should notify me in advance. If you miss an exam without permission, you will receive a zero.
• Students may be allowed up to 11 tries for correct answer to homework and partial-credit exams under Loncapa. Depending on the assignment, problems may open up to 7 days before their due time. It is the student responsibility to find an appropriate site from which to enter answers. It is further the student responsibility to start working early enough to make arriving at a right answer possible, exploiting on-line and Help Room assistance. Network outages do occur and cannot be precluded from occuring right before any deadline. Without exceptional circumstances, no extensions will be given for the assignments. I.e., in particular, "The net was down when I tried to enter my problems from Ohio." or "I couldn't get Loncapa to work from my parent's computer." will not be accepted as valid excuses.
• To partly compensate for any missed deadlines, the sum of contributions to the net class score adds up to 103%.

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