Course Requirements, Evaluation and Milestones/Deadlines

Assignments and Grading: You will have many different kinds of assignments.

1. Class participation (10% of grade). You must do the assignments and prepare yourself to discuss them in class.  The success of the course will depend in part on active participation in discussion. Being a student in a liberal arts college means you have a responsibility not only to learn for yourself, but to teach each other through conversation. I will therefore especially value contributions to our discussions which:

• show clear understanding of the readings and subject at hand;
• help to make connections among ideas or readings under consideration, or in some other way focus our analysis of the topic under discussion; or
• help to get us unstuck.

2. Daily questions (10% of grade, 5% for each half-semester).  Each day you will hand in an answer to a question I ask at the beginning of class about the readings we will be discussing that day.  You get 1 for writing your name, 2 for minimally answering the question, and 3 for a well-informed and thoughtful (brief!) answer.  At the end of each half-semester, I will add up the total.   Each person can choose two days during the semester on which they take a free cull-credit pass by writing "pass" on their paper.  Daily questions cannot be made up after absences, though I will excuse students for legitimate reasons.

3. Four short papers (60% of grade, value of each paper will vary).  You will hand in a brief paper every few weeks in response to prompts that I will hand out a week in advance.  The first two will focus on deriving and testing an hypothesis; the third will present hypotheses about the coming simulation; and the fourth will describe and analyze something that happened in the simulation.

4. A legislative case study paper (20% of grade): a report on a research project you will conduct, based primarily on resources you will find on the web.  I will be very specific about what I want you to put into this report, which will take the form of an hypothesis test about the development of a particular bill in Congress, with the findings written up in a brief, well-documented paper due at the end of the semester.  Start early.

All papers must be submitted on paper in my mailbox in the Politics Department office by 4:30 pm on the dates below.

As you work on these papers, I encourage you to make use of the Writing Center (on the second floor of Smith Campus Center, above the Coop Fountain), which offers students free, one-on-one consultations at any stage of the writing process — from generating a thesis and structuring an argument to fine-tuning a draft.  The Writing Fellows — Pomona students majoring in subjects including Molecular Biology, Public Policy Analysis, and Religious Studies — will work with you on an assignment from any discipline.  Consultations are available by appointment, which you can make online: http://writing.pomona.edu/writingcenter.

Grace Days: These deadlines are real and I will penalize late papers one point per day unless I announce otherwise in class.  I will only grant paper extensions by negotiation at least one week in advance, so if you need an extension, ask for one. Beyond that, you have three grace days this semester.  That is, you have three extension days (including weekend days) to use at any time during the term, without asking my permission.  These will operate on an honor system: I will trust you to notify me when you are taking a grace day, and to keep track yourself of how many you have used.

© David Menefee-Libey
Last modified: January 22, 2008