Writing

On or before the Monday class each week students will be given several questions that may ask the student to relate the biology topic presented on Monday with the informatics readings assigned for the following Wednesday. The questions may also be purely factual to ensure the reading has been done so that the discussion on Wed is productive. But in general the questions should only require short answers.

Students will be expected to provide written answers to these questions by the beginning of class on the following Wednesday. Answers should be in Word or similar, approximately 1 but no more than 2 pages, margins 1 inch all around, left justify only, 12 point Times New Roman.

Grading will be as follows for each question: 0 no credit, 1 partial credit, 2 full credit. Thus the maximum possible score per weekly writing assignment will be 2 times the number of questions. At the end of the quarter the score for each week will be normalized to a maximum of 100 in order to assure that the grades for each week will be weighted equally. As noted in the overview, the overall writing assigments will be weighted to account for 15% of the grade.