Introduction to Geographic Information Systems

Policies

Your grade in this course will be determined as follows:

Class Participation and Attendance

Part of your grade this semester will be based on your level of participation in class. To participate, you obviously have to attend class, and you are expected to attend each and every class session. Because emergencies do come up, you will be allowed 2 absences for the semester, though you will be held responsible for the material you miss. With your 3rd absence, your class participation grade will be lowered one full grade, such as from an A- to a B-. With your 4th absence, you will receive an F for the course regardless of your test and paper scores.

In class, you should participate actively by asking questions and interjecting relevant comments and observations based on your experiences, the lab assignments, or the course readings. You should come to class having read the assigned materials and having thought about them. You must also resist the urge to check your e-mail, surf the web, or otherwise work on the computers at inappropriate times during class, such as during lecture. This can be extremely distracting to the instructor and to your classmates. Your failure to adhere to this class policy will result in a reduction of your class participation score. Repeat offenders will fail this portion of the course. Serious abusers will fail the course outright! Instead, play an active role in class!

Late Work

Late work will not be tolerated or accepted in this course. You may submit written exercises and assignments for credit through the dates indicated on the schedule, but consider those dates to be deadlines. After those dates, I will not accept your work for any reason except a documented illness. If you expect to miss class on a day that an assignment is due because of an excused absence, you must submit your work ahead of time. Of course, I will accept late work when computer network downtime or similar outages prevent access to ArcView.

Exam Instructions

From time to time, students fail to read carefully the instructions on exams and mistakenly answer an insufficient number of short answer items or multiple choice questions. In this course, the instructions on the exams are part of the test. These instructions will be clear and plainly evident, and you may always ask for clarification of the day of the exams. Realize, however, that if you answer six short answer questions when I ask for five, I will grade the first five answers I come to on your test. If you only answer four, you will receive 0 points for the missing answer, and you cannot make up the question later. This is the only way I can be fair to everyone in the class, so read the instructions on your test carefully.

Incomplete Grade

If, as the semester ends, you have outstanding assignments or missed exams, do not assume that I will assign you an "Incomplete" for a grade. Since missed exams must be made up within one week of the original test date and since I will not accept late work under all but the most extreme circumstances, be aware that I will record these items as Fs in my grade book. If that lowers your final average to 59.5 or lower, you will receive an F for the course. If you feel an I is appropriate for this course due to an illness or extended emergency of some sort, you must speak to me about it personally and request the Incomplete before the final exam on Thursday, May 10.

Honor Code

The VU academic community operates under the Honor System, specifically the following Honor Code:

"I have neither given or received nor have I tolerated others' use of unauthorized aid."

You are, nevertheless, authorized and even encouraged to work in groups on lab exercises. If you choose to work with a partner or two, you are authorized to discuss any and all questions on your assignments. You must, however, answer the questions on your assignment sheet in your own words. I will treat identical answers on homework assignments as Honor Code violations.

You will have to work in groups on the research assignment project and presentation due near the end of the semester. Group members are responsible for "dividing the labor" and otherwise completing the task, but remember that you and your other group members constitute a team. You will need to work together in completing all the components of the assignment, especially since you will receive one grade for the group. For this assignment, you are authorized to submit one report with all group members' names on the title page.

About Computers

During the course of the semester, you will work on a variety of tasks on the computers in the Kallay Lab (Schnabel 34). Some of these tasks will involve the use of fairly mainstream computer programs like Netscape or Microsoft Word, while others use more specialized programs like Microsoft Excel or ESRI's ArcView. All of these programs operate in the now-familiar Windows environment, but they can take some time to master. If you consider yourself at all computer illiterate, or if you don't believe you'll be able to complete this course's computer-based assignments, speak to me immediately. For this course, you will also need 1) an active Artemis account (without one, you will be unable to log onto the computers properly and print your work) and 2) an e-mail address, preferably on Simeon (so I can distribute information to you easily). Again, if you have a problem with either of these two requirements, speak to me immediately.