Intro Class FAQ

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  • Is class attendance required?
    • Sort of. There is no policy that mandates attendance or else, but there are questions embedded in the lectures which require either iClickers or TopHat to answer, and the points from these questions do represent a part of the final grade. There are also topics addressed in the lectures that are not in the textbook, so if you only read the book or download the lectures, you won't have much of a handle on them when exam time rolls around. One axiom of college is that attending every lecture will not guarantee you a good grade, but missing a lot of lectures will almost certainly guarantee you a bad one.

  • Do you post lecture materials on the Web?
    • The lectures in class are posted as pdfs on the campus learning management system, Canvas. Students often ask if I can simply post them as PowerPoint files, but I use Keynote (Apple's presentation software) rather than PowerPoint. Since Apple and Microsoft generally do not play well together, it is not feasible to convert the Keynote-type files into PowerPoint-type files, because formatting errors make the converted files nearly illegible.

  • If you post the lecture presentations online, then why do we need to come to class?
    • Aside from the points gained from the questions embedded in lecture (which are not in the online pdfs), the lecture is more than just the individual slides in the presentation. If you look at the slides, you will see there is relatively little text present; on most slides there is barely a sentence or two. Instead of just reading the text on a slide and moving on, I will spend a couple of minutes explaining the text and pointing out how the graphics help illustrate the point I am trying to make. If you miss class, you miss the opportunity to annotate the presentation slides with your own notes that can help when you start studying.

  • Could I use an earlier (and cheaper!) edition of the required text?
    • Well...maybe. Textbook authors and publishers generally do not make an enormous number of changes between versions, so for example, the 4th edition of a text will be nearly identical to the 5th edition. With an emphasis on nearly. There will be a few changes, and without a detailed comparison, they can often be hard to find. This means there may be a booby-trap awaiting your studying.

      The most likely place for one of these booby-traps lies in the online quizzes. The questions on the quizzes are provided by the publisher for each new edition; I simply format and upload them to Canvas. If some of the quiz questions are created from the most recent edition, and you have an earlier edition, you may find it much more difficult to answer them.

      Is the lower price worth the risk to your grade? I can't answer that question. You will have to decide.


  • What about the online quizzes?
    • We will be using the online quiz function in Canvas for chapter quizzes. At 8 am a day or so ahead of the start of a new topic, an online quiz for that topic will become available. It will be 5 questions, 1 point apiece, and drawn from a pool of questions created from the matching chapter text. The quizzes will close at midnight 5 or so days after they have opened. The quiz deadlines will be on the Canvas calendar, but I will not be announcing the opening of each and every quiz. There are no excused misses for the quizzes; if you need to miss a quiz for some reason, you can use one of your drops.

      The quizzes are open note, open book, and have no time limit except for the deadline. If you are unhappy with your score, you can take the quiz a second time (a new set of questions will be drawn from the pool), and the higher score will be recorded. The lowest four quiz scores will be dropped, and the remaining scores will make up roughly 10% of the course grade.

      Keep in mind that these quizzes are only available online, so if the system goes down or your internet connection fails at the last minute, you are out of luck and will have use one of your drops. The quizzes will be open for nearly a week, so under no circumstances will I accept a my-dog-ate-my-wifi type of excuse!


  • What about the questions embedded into the lectures?
    • Periodically during the lectures, I will embed questions for the class to answer. These questions will be highly similar in style and content to those that will appear on the exams. To answer them, you will need to use the classroom response software, TopHat, which will run on a smart phone, tablet or laptop. (Note that in previous terms, I required the use of iClicker devices for these questions. iClickers will not work with TopHat, so you will need to download the software instead). The lowest four TopHat scores will be dropped, and the remaining scores will make up roughly 10% of the course grade.

      Also note that I will reuse some of the TopHat questions on the lecture exams (about 10% of the exam questions will be reused questions), and since these questions are not included in the posted lectures notes, so the only way to see them before the exam is to come to class.


  • How much studying should I do per week?
    • A good rule of thumb is to spend a minimum of one hour per week per course hour. For a class that has three hours of lecture per week, that is three hours of your time per week in reading the text and going over your notes. At a minimum.

  • Is there something I can do for extra credit?
    • No. Given the sizes of the intro classes, it simply is not feasible to allow students to write papers and the like for extra credit. Think about it: A class of 100 students each writing a 5 page paper at the end of the term (note that no one ever asks about writing a paper at the start of the class), would make the grades impossibly late. The credit available from the questions embedded in the lecture and the quizzes online actually provide you with more points than one of the exams, so the best strategy is to make sure you are earning all of those points.

  • What are your exams like?
    • Typically, they run between 50 and 60 questions total, made up of roughly one-third multiple choice, one-third matching and one-third true/false. The number of questions per topic is roughly proportional to the amount of time spent in lecture on the topic.

  • What is the best way to study for your exams?
    • The exam questions are drawn straight from the lecture presentations and not directly from the book. Since both the lectures and the book are discussing the same topics (in slightly different ways), the best way to prepare will be to make use of both. Frequently, however, students become frustrated when studying because the sheer volume of material covered on any given exam tends to render a simplistic study approach (read book, read notes, repeat) ineffective.

      Obviously the trick is to figure out what is mostly likely to appear on the exam and focus most of your time on that. This seems a lot easier said than done, but it turns out that following a very simple recipe will give you the most bang for the buck on your studying. The first step is to make a very short, simple (one side of one piece of paper) outline of each chapter. It should consist of nothing more than an indented, bulleted list of the all the chapter headings and sub-headings.

      The next step is to compare this outline with the lecture presentations and the notes you took. If one section of the book was heavily discussed in the lecture, mark that section (pink highlighter?) to be emphasized. If a section of the book was not discussed at all in lecture, then it won't be on the exam, and you can safely skip it. The same holds true of the textbook graphics: If there are many chapter figures used in the lecture, then pay the figures (and captions) a good deal of attention.

  • Do you hold review sessions before exams?
    • No. The size of the classes and the widely varying schedules of the students make it about impossible to find a time when a majority could participate. Instead, I post a practice exam online a few days ahead of the scheduled exam date.

  • What are the practice exams like?
    • The practice exams are normally about half the length of the real exams and the questions they contain are taken from the same database of questions I use to make up the real exams. The answers to each of the questions are provided at the end of the practice exams.

  • Do you offer study sheets for your exams?
    • There are many different interpretations of what a "study sheet" is. Some students consider a study sheet as a list of all possible questions that might be on the exam. Others view one as an outline of all the information covered for this test - a sort of "Cliff's Notes" version of the course. Obviously, I could write up a number of similar possibilities, but it should be clear that there are so many that it isn't practical for me to try and prepare one. On the other hand, if you prepare your own study sheet based on what works best for you, the effort in doing so will actually be the most effective means of studying I can imagine.

  • Can you suggest a way for us to make our own study sheets?
    • One way will be to take the practice exam that you have just finished and change the format of the questions. Turn the multiple choice questions into matching questions, the true-false questions into multiple choice, etc. Have your study partner(s) do the same, then swap your newly practice exams and retake them. The more questions you practice on a given topic, the more likely you will run across one very similar to those I have prepared for the exam.

  • Do you offer make-up exams?
    • Yes, but a missed exam must be made up before the day/time of any subsequent exam. Otherwise, you will get a zero. Note that if you do miss an exam, it is entirely your responsibility to make the exam up. I will not hound you over it, nor will I take exceptional measures to accommodate your schedule. It's your degree, it's your grade, it's your responsibility.

  • Do you drop any of the lecture exams?
    • No. There may have been some geoscience classes in the past where this was offered, but none of my classes have ever had a drop-the-lowest exam option.

  • Why don't you hand back the exams so we can study from them?
    • None of the exams are comprehensive, so you will not need an earlier exam to study for any subsequent exams. Besides that, writing good, clear questions is challenging, and I can only prepare a few new ones (one or two dozen) per term. Writing bad questions is easy; I could fill a room with bad questions, even without using those supplied by the textbook vendors. In general, a test made of bad questions leads to bad grades, something we all want to avoid. Because of this, I prefer to hoard my limited supply of good questions so that I can reuse them.

  • Some of the questions on the exam weren't covered in class!
    • This is a comment that occurs from time to time. I work very hard to make certain that all of the questions on any given exam are derived from the relevant material, be it my notes, the sections of the textbook we cover, figures, or other material that has showed up in class. I make no claims to infallibility, however, so I have a standing offer for just such a concern. If a student feels certain that a question or questions on the exam were not covered, then they should come in during my office hours and we'll compare the test and the relevant lectures. If we find a question that isn't covered in the lectures, I will immediately give everyone full credit for that question (this effectively turns it into an extra credit question: those who got it right are rewarded, but those who missed it are not penalized).

      To date, no one has has been able to do this. Why? Simply put, I write the exams with the lecture notes in front of me, so it is very unlikely for an exam to have questions not covered in the lectures.

      Therefore, the most likely way this concern can be raised is a three-part process:

      • 1) Student does not attend lecture(s), resulting in incomplete notes.
      • 2) Student forgets that notes are incomplete, and gets blind-sided by questions on exam that were covered in missed lecture(s).
      • 3) Student becomes indignant.

      Fortunately, there is a guaranteed solution to this dilemma. Attend class.


  • Are your average final grades really in the C range?
    • As I note on the syllabus, the course is designed so that an average college student who puts in an average amount of effort will get an average college grade, which is usually about a C. If this is not an acceptable result for you, then resolve not to be average.

  • Ohmigawd! I've never gotten a (insert unexpectedly low grade here) before!
    • Take a deep breath; this is not the end of the world. The first step in improving will be to come in during my office hours so we can go over your exam. Perhaps one particular type of question tripped you up, or maybe you weren't as familiar with one of the topics as you thought. An After Exam Report like this can go a long way to improving your results on the next exam. If you want to go further, when you are reviewing your notes between exams (you are spending at least three hours on this lecture every week, right?), use a highlighter to note sections that are not as clear as they might be. Then come by my office with your notes perhaps 3 or 4 days before the next exam to get these points cleared up.

      Finally, you should note that in coming to college, you have moved up a level, and the competition gets stiffer as you move up. The work that earned A's and B's at the last level might only be worth a C here.


  • You've posted the final grades and I didn't get the grade I was hoping for. Is there anything I can do?
    • Unless there has been an error of some kind, no. If you aren't happy with your final grade, the time to do something about it is before you get it.

  • But I only missed a (insert preferred grade here) by (insert fraction here) of a point!
    • A percentage point over the course of a term is not just a single point on a single exam. Crediting you with one more percent than you earned isn't fair to everyone else in the class.

  • But I've always been a (insert higher than earned grade here) student!
    • Keep in mind that it's just a college course. Some people perform well, some people perform poorly, most people perform at an average level. It isn't an indication of your qualities as a person.

  • I e-mailed you but you didn't respond in time!
    • When I am in my office during a normal day, my browser checks for new messages about every 30 minutes or so. I try very hard to respond to these messages as quickly as I can, particularly when they are from students asking about class matters. But when I leave campus (either at the end of the day or over the weekend or during a scheduled break or conference), I simply don't access the campus e-mail system that frequently. In everyday terms, this means that an urgent request for help sent after 5 PM probably won't be seen until the next morning.