Class Policies
Please do your own work
Modern science is collaborative, and people learn from talking to each other. Feel free to talk to your instructors and to other students about assignments. However, the work you turn in must be your own — do not copy assignments, or take credit for work done by someone else. Copying is considered cheating, and will be be handled according to university policy.
Participation
There is a large demand for the limited number of spaces in this class, and we need to treat those who are hoping to join fairly. If you fail to complete the pre-class survey within the first week of the semester, I will assume that you do not intend to participate in this class and apply an administrative drop to free up a space for another student. If three assignments are not turned in and you have not contacted me, or if you do not take the midterm examination, I will assume that you are no longer attending class and will again apply an administrative drop.
Communication
The bulk of the material for this course is presented online, and can be found from the class home page.
We will also make use of threaded discussion boards and the chat tool within the NMSU Canvas LMS. When you have a question about the course, your first thought should be to post it under one of our discussion threads (we have one for each laboratory exercise, and others for various other components of the course). To encourage students to participate, we will give out extra credit at the end of the semester to anyone who has made a concerted effort to help other students by answering their questions there.
If your question is personal (it relates to your grade on an assignment, or concerns your ability to complete the course due to health or other issues, for example), then you should send an e-mail to your instructor. Any question that might be of interest or help to other students, however, should be posted to the discussion boards so that it can be answered there for all to see.
Office hours are posted on the class home page, in person when appropriate and via Google+ Hangouts.
It can be easy to be misunderstood when using electronic communication methods, so we have a few ground rules to help keep matters civil.
- Do not CAPITALIZE ENTIRE MESSAGES FOR ADDED IMPACT. This is commonly interpreted as shouting, and is harder to read than well-punctuated text.
- If your message is longer than a few sentences, break it into separate paragraphs so that it is easier to follow.
- Once you have written a note, re-read it for clarity before posting it, Use a spell-checker, and make sure that you define your terms properly. (Write "lecture 4, on the phases of the Moon", rather than "the last lecture".) Ask yourself whether your note would make sense to you if you read it in a week, and if not, then revise it before sending it.
- If you disagree with something another person has written, be polite, and focus on the subject matter rather than the individual. (Write "I think that you may have missed a factor of 100 when converting from centimeters to meters" rather than "You're an idiot!")
- If you send an e-mail, begin with a salutation ("Dear Professor Vogt," or "Hello Nicole,"), state your concern politely with enough details to make your point, and then close with your name ("Sincerely, Annie Jump Cannon"). If you don't sign your e-mails, we won't know who you are!
Assignments
Keep careful track of the work to be done each week from the course web page for assignments. This is probably the most useful web page for this course.
In order to keep track of all of the work that you submit you need to clearly label every assignment (laboratory reports, exams, and extra credit write-ups) with your full name.
Pre-Class and Post-Class Surveys
You will be asked to fill out two short online surveys for this class, one at the beginning and one at the end of the semester. We will ask you a few questions about your background, and about how you interacted with various resources provided to you for this class.
The survey information is used to explain to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) agency how the materials for this class are being used to help students. NASA is interested in stimulating an interest in science and in education in your generation, and has generously funded us to develop all of the materials used for this course (such the self-review library and the laboratory exercise computer software and video tutorials). Without their help, we could not offer any general education astronomy courses online at the main NMSU campus, so please work with us to complete these surveys so that we can continue to develop resources for future students.
Quiz and Homework Assignments
Quizzes and homework assignments are are conducted through the self-review library. This is an online archive of 12,000+ astronomy questions, grouped according to our 26 lecture modules. It has its own FAQ, and you should read through it.
Your self-review library access code is equal to the last four digits of your Aggie ID. If your last name is hyphenated, please enter only the portion which appears before the hyphen for your "last name". This access code will also work for the pre-class and post-class surveys, and for the lab plotting tools.
You should begin your studies each week by reading through the lecture slides for the week and listening to audio recordings of the lectures from a previous semester. Then log into the self-review library, and start working through practice (review mode) quizzes of those lectures for your homework. The point of attempting problems on each topic is to strengthen your understanding of the material, so don't be disappointed if your scores start out low — they will rise as you learn. Take at least 20 review quizzes each week, to fully explore the questions for those lectures in the library archive.
Your homework grade will be calculated two ways, and you will receive the higher of the two scores. Your default homework score is your average score on the review quizzes. However, we want you to study freely without worrying about your scores. One point of having such a large archive of questions is to allow students who are having difficulty with a topic to work through problems at their own pace, until they are comfortable with the material. If you take an average of at least 20 review quizzes per week, your second homework score will be 100%. If you take at least 18 quizzes per week, it will be 90%, for 16-17 quizzes it will be 80%, for 14-15 quizzes it will be 70%, and for 12-13 quizzes per week it will be 60%. You will receive the higher of your average score on your review quizzes and your second homework score, as your homework grade. As long as you average at least 20 review quizzes per week, your homework score will be 100%.
Once you have taken at least 20 review quizzes and your average scores on them are 80 to 100%, then you should be ready for your weekly graded quiz. Select the weekly quiz option, to receive a quiz for a quiz grade. This quiz will be drawn from the same large set of questions, so if you have reviewed the material thoroughly you should have no surprises. Keep in mind that there are at least 40 different types of questions on every lecture. If you find yourself being surprised by questions that come up on your weekly quiz, then you are not doing enough review work in preparation. The key difference between a weekly graded quiz and a review quiz is that you will no longer have links embedded in each question pointing back to the lecture slides or offering hints for the problems.
Each weekly quiz can be taken once; the 16 weekly quizzes will be averaged to form your quiz grade. You can check your progress against that of previous student cohorts by clicking on the "Progress Report" button when requesting a new quiz.
You can conduct review on any lecture at any time. The weekly quizzes are available for a period of three weeks. You can thus take them a week early, during the week of the semester where the key lectures are covered, or (in emergencies) up to a week late. The best policy is to take each quiz during the week that it is covered — you do not want to fall behind the material. We extend the time window in which each quiz can be taken a full week in either direction to cover travel, illness, and accidents, so take your quizzes in a timely fashion so that you do not end up with scores of zero. The final deadlines are on Saturday evenings each week, at 10pm.
When you sit down to work through problems in the self-review library, bring a calculator and choose a quiet location where you will not be disturbed. Do not keep a television or radio on at the same time, and do not play with social media in another browser window on your computer. Do not work when you are too tired to stay awake, or if you are under the influence of alcohol.
Every semester one or two students "discover" that if they begin a weekly, graded quiz and lose their nerve, they can kill their browser window rather than submitting their answers, study some more, and then return and take a second shot at the graded quiz. They may think that they are getting away with cherry-picking their quizzes, but in fact every time anyone does this a large red flag is raised next to their name in the self-review library records. Please don't try this — it is no fun for your instructor to call you on the carpet for taking an unfair advantage of other students by not respecting the even playing field. This option exists for the rare case where a student begins a graded quiz and then loses power or internet conductivity, or has an emergency. If you do this once in the semester, we'll let it slide, but if it re-occurs we'll set the affected weekly quiz scores to zero to be fair to your peers.
A complete record of your quiz work is preserved within the library archive for your instructor. You may make an appointment to review your work with them if you find that helpful.
Lab Assignments
There are six two-week laboratory exercises associated with this course, and you can find all of the online materials for them here. You can print your own copy from our online PDF-format version, or work week-by-week from the individual PDF-format chapters here.
Each laboratory exercise takes place over a two-week period. Your lab reports will be created and submitted through the free online Google GMail/Documents/Drive package. Lab #1 contains detailed instructions on how to create your own free account for this in both the manual chapter and the video tutorial, if you do not already have one. Get your account working and download the first GEAS template for your lab #1 report quickly, so that you have time to request assistance if you have questions. Your instructors will comment on your work before the final submission, and help you to work through your questions on each laboratory exercise, so be sure to share your laboratory report with them as soon as you create it (at the beginning of each two-week lab exercise period) so that they can check your initial work.
Share your online laboratory reports with your instructors, who are using the gmail.com addresses prof01.nmsu.geas and ta01.nmsu.geas for this purpose. This will show us that you have mastered the Google Documents system, and allow us to write comments to help you in your laboratory report.
You will also be working with our online plotting package, and various astronomy analysis tools. These are platform-independent (you can work from a PC running Windows, a Mac, or a Linux box) and do not require that you download or install any software. However, it is again a good idea to check that you understand how to use them early in the semester (both types are used in lab #1). The plotting program accepts the same access code as the self-review library.
Many of these exercises have a hands-on component, in which you conduct a simple scientific experiment. Read through the list of needed materials at the beginning of each exercise a week ahead of time, so that you are prepared.
This course satisfies a general education requirement, so writing is an essential component. Consequently, each of your lab reports must include a description of the problem that the lab addresses and the techniques used to solve it, and a final discussion summarizing what was learned. It is important that these be written clearly and in good English.
Exams
We will hold two exams for this course, a midterm exam the week of October 2 – 6 and a final exam the week of December 4 – 8. Many of you have indicated that you prefer to the main NMSU campus for exams, so our default plan will be to hold each exam in a classroom on campus at a time most convenient for as many of you as possible.
We will conduct a short poll early in the semester, to select a time and day for each exam.
Once the exam time is set, there may be a few people who cannot attend one of the exams. If you are one of those people, you will need to contact your instructor immediately to arrange for an alternate plan. Ideally, you will be able to take the exam on the main NMSU campus at another time during the same week. If this too is not an option, then you will need to arrange for a formal proctor to work with you during that same week at your location, one who will need to be approved. This is not a simple process, so if you can manage to take each exam at the main NMSU campus you will save both yourself and us a certain amount of hassle.
Exams will not be returned, but may be discussed by appointment.
Grading
The final course grades will be on a curve, but if you have more than 90% of the total number of points available you will receive at least an A, 80 to 90% at least a B, and 70 to 80% at least a C. You must earn a C or better to receive a Satisfactory rating if you have opted for the S/U option.
An incomplete will be given only when a student has a C grade or better at the time the incomplete is requested and cannot complete the class due to circumstances beyond her/his control. These circumstances must have developed after the last day to withdraw from the class. Appropriate circumstances include a documented illness, death or crisis in the student's immediate family. Job-related problems are not appropriate grounds.
You will have one week from the time an assignment is returned to bring up any perceived errors. There are (rarely!) occasions when grading errors occur, so you should review your work carefully.
Textbook
The recommended textbook for this course (Astronomy by Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff) is online and there is no charge to read it. It provides background material on topics in general astronomy, and so is particularly useful for non-science majors. If you prefer to read a printed book you may purchase one, but it is not required. We suggest that the following types of students consider obtaining a printed book.
- Students who strongly prefer reading printed books to reading from a computer screen
- Students for whom English is a second or third language, or who have no background in science, who may benefit from more detailed descriptions of new concepts
- Physics majors who are considering completing a minor degree in astronomy
You may if you wish select a different printed general astronomy textbook at the college level, if one is available to you. Simply read the chapters with titles that match the topics under discussion in our course each week. You could also work through your homework and quizzes for the first few lectures, and complete your first laboratory exercises, and then decide whether you need a separate reference text.
If you are determined to secure a printed copy of a textbook but find it a hardship to purchase one, please contact us to discuss your situation. We can help.
SSD
If you have a disability that interferes with your academic progress, please contact Services for Students with Disabilities for an appointment to discuss accommodation.