The Policy of Policies

In order to be fair and consistent, I don’t make exceptions to the following policies. No exceptions.

Attendance and Participation

Please arrive at discussions having done the reading, prepared to ask questions and actively participate. Attendance will be taken at every class, or at each discussion section (in CWL 242), and factored in to your participation grade. Students missing more than three weeks of class (or discussion sections) over the course of the semester should be on notice that this will have a particularly significant effect on their grade; students missing five weeks or more of class (or discussion sections in 242) will automatically fail the course, regardless of the reasons for their absence. Much of what we learn in the humanities comes not just from doing the readings, but from being in the class, from the discussions and comments from teachers and fellow students—missing more than a third of that experience means that I cannot fairly compare you or your performance to that of your fellow students.

Sometimes students have a medical or a personal emergency during the semester; if you have missed a large chunk of class for such a reason, I encourage you to consult with the Emergency Dean about your options, such as a late drop.

Late Work

Late work will be marked down one notch (an A- becomes a B+) for the first week it is late; two notches for the second week.  Your TA may elect to accept late work after two weeks, but does not have to:  in any case, work more than two weeks late will be given a maximum grade of 50% (still substantially better than nothing, however). You should always contact your TA about late work or work not handed in, well in advance of the due date whenever possible, or as soon afterward as you can.

Conflict Final

Unfortunately, students sometimes wish to take the final early: they may wish to attend a sibling’s graduation or start a family vacation early, or they may just want to end the semester as early as possible.  I cannot accommodate such requests—it’s against university policy, and I have no way of knowing whether you’re just knocking off early (not a very good excuse, you must admit) or whether your long-lost twin sister really is graduating from Cal State Long Beach.  Like all of my other policies, I don’t make exceptions.  The only students that the university stipulates may take conflict finals are those who would have to take three final examinations in the same day (see this part of the student code); I will schedule a conflict final only in those cases, or for students with disabilities.  For everyone else, plan to stay for the final exam, even if it is the last final exam scheduled for the semester.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism means “handing in work that you claim is your own original work when it is not.”  Any student who hands in any work of any kind for this course that contains material written by someone else (usually taken from the internet, but not always) that is not clearly cited (i.e., with quotation marks, title of essay, page numbers, etc.) will receive a failing grade for the entire course.

Let me give a few examples, so we’re clear about what constitutes plagiarism:  if you hand in even a rough draft in which a paragraph is copied from SparkNotes, you will fail the class.  If you hand in an essay in which one sentence is copied from someone else’s personal web site, you will fail the class.  If you hand in a response paper in which a couple of unimportant sentences are copied from a web site or a essay you found in the library, you will fail the class.  If you write every word of all your essays and are a model student all semester, but copy a couple of sentences on your very last paper, you will fail the class.  If you missed all the lectures where I explained this policy, and you didn’t know about the web site where I explain it, and you missed that part of orientation where they explained what plagiarism is, and somehow you grew up not knowing that stealing things from other people was wrong, you will still fail the class.

Almost every year that I teach, at least one student fails because of plagiarism or some other form of academic dishonesty—sometimes more than one.