Saratoga Hunt development (Prince William County)
black fence is intended to capture silt, and red fence shows area designated for no-disturbance protection
(hmmm... should the county inspector have given a passing grade to this project?)
Grades will be based on a total of 1,000 points:
| Online Quizzes | 600 points |
| E-Mail Interaction | 150 points |
| Final Exam | 250 points |
| Grades | |
|---|---|
| A+ | 966-1,000 points |
| A | 933-965 points |
| A- | 901-932 points |
| B+ | 866-900 points |
| B | 833-865 points |
| B- | 801-832 points |
| C+ | 766-800 points |
| C | 733-765 points |
| C- | 701-732 points |
| D | 650-700 points |
| F | below 650 points |
This class includes 12 quizzes in just one semester. You will demonstrate what you know, and discover what you still need to study, with each quiz. Each quiz is worth 60 points, and each quiz will also provide feedback on your progress. You'll know after the quizzes are graded if you are on track to get an A... or to fail the class, so you will have lots of time to step up the studying several notches before final grades are submitted to the Registrar. The weekly quizzes also guarantee that you can *not* wait to get serious about reading the material. You've registered and paid tuition, so you deserve more than a self-study distance learning class. It's your money and your time. Don't cheat yourself; do the work.
Quiz questions will come from the online material identified for study each week - including the Web Exercise, Map Exercise, Site Visit, and Newspaper Article(s) - plus the Virginia Journey class videos. For the Fall 2008 class, all the video-based questions will be for just extra credit. (If the universe evolves as it should, I'll be updating the videos for future classes.)
Quizzes will be administered online by Blackboard. There will be 12 quizzes, worth 60 points each. The lowest 2 grades of the 12 quizzes will be dropped, so only the top 10 quiz grades will be counted. If you do the math, you'll see that you can earn 600 total possible points from the 10 quizzes that are counted. I drop 2 of the 12 quizzes in part to help your grade, and I recognize some students will have a family crisis or some problem with taking a quiz on one or two weeks. You already have permission to skip a quiz - or even two - but don't skip three quizzes, and be sure to do well on 10 quizzes because they make up 60% of your final grade.
The quizzes will have a mix of 10-25 questions. A few will require you to match items in one column with the appropriate item in a second column (such as "here is a list of rivers and counties - match the county with the river that runs through it"). Most questions will be multiple choice. You will select what you consider to be the one correct answer for each question, and then turn in the quiz by clicking the Submit button. NOTE: Blackboard allows you to partially complete a quiz, save your answers, then return to the quiz and complete it later.
Expect quizzes to ask questions from previous classes. In Week 10, you may find climate or geology questions from Week 2... and you should expect to see watershed-related questions on lots of quizzes. The Final Exam will also be cumulative, with questions on the material covered in the first week as well as the last week. After all, life is cumulative - when you go to sleep at night, you don't forget how to drive a car and start life from scratch the next morning. At the end of the semester you should remember what you learned about Virginia boundaries, rivers, and other material at the start of this class.
All quizzes and exams and other projects will be open book. "Open Book" means you can use books, videos, newspapers, Web pages, atlases, USGS topo maps, aerial photography, the DeLorme Virginia Atlas and Gazetteer, the state highway map, etc... but you must answer all the questions yourself, without assistance.You can not post the questions on a listserver/newsgroup and hope others will do the research/remembering/thinking for you...
You are part of a community with an Honor Code. You are encouraged to study with others, watch videotapes together, discuss topics together on the listserver, and tell your friends about what you are learning regarding Virginia geography. However, when you get the quizzes/exam and it comes to showing what you know, you can not ask anyone else for help and you can not accept help from others. All work must be exclusively yours. You can use the Web, the library, videotapes, and your notes as resources to help answer the questions, but no consultations with others (no "lifelines") are permitted on quizzes/exams.
Multiple choice questions will have only 1 correct answer. They are intended to demonstrate that you can think with a place-based orientation ("where is Virginia Beach in relation to the Roanoke River?") and apply what you have learned ("why does Virginia Beach get some of its drinking water from the Roanoke River, requiring an expensive pipeline stretching so far away from the city?") . You may find it challenging to select the correct answer, if your previous experience with geography was to memorize-and-regurgitate the capitals of the 50 states. This is a university-level geography class intended to strengthen your critical thinking capabilities, not to test your memorization talents. Quizzes and the exam for "Geography of Virginia" are open book because in the real world, if you need to know the county seat of Lee County or the number of residents in Fairfax County, you can Google for it (or even look it up in a printed atlas).
You can earn 150 points for e-mail participation if you correspond with me every week - yes, we'll be pen pals throughout the semester. Specific questions requiring a response will be provided in the course material for each class. You should send me your response in an e-mail, along with some feedback about your experiences with the Web Exercise, Map Exercise, Site Visit, and Newspaper Article(s) assigned for that class.
The questions will stretch your brain and require you to think. Your e-mails should provide your response in a few sentences or paragraphs; these are not questions that can be answered with just one or two words. Unlike the quizzes/exam, there may be more than 1 correct answer to the questions. They will invite your opinions and are intended to stimulate your ability to explain why certain places have specific physical/cultural features, such as "why does the Census Bureau report there are more American Indian and Alaska Native persons in Fairfax County than in any other political jurisdiction in Virginia?"
You may also be invited to apply your new geography expertise and predict the future - "how could a new university in Martinsville trigger job growth in Henry County?" or "which political party will gain additional seats in the next election for the House of Delegates, and why?" You can't show your expertise in Virginia geography by answering these questions in just a few words.
By the end of the semester, you should be comfortable thinking with a geographic perspective about current events and about what you see outside the car window. You should have new skills in understanding the "why of where" regarding Virginia. You'll also be able to impress your friends and neighbors with your expertise on a range of topics related to Virginia, rather than just shrug your shoulders when someone starts pontificating about politics, traffic, saving the Chesapeake Bay, etc. As an added bonus, you should have some good material for a conversation with that know-it-all person you run into each year during the December holidays at the family/office/neighborhood party...
This is not a distance learning class where you can study in isolation. To earn all 150 points, you must correspond with me about each class, 14 times during the semester. Logical explanations for your opinions, cogent comments on statements made by others, suggestions of information sources and references, as well as reasonable answers (or incorrect answers that are reasonable) to the questions will help earn points.
Don't wait until the last class and send me 14 messages. Send at least one message each class commenting on the course material or asking questions to increase your understanding of Virginia and to make the course more useful to you. If you don't understand why you missed a quiz question, then explain your reasons for your answer and ask for clarification, so you will get the answer right when a similar question appears on a future quiz or the final exam. This is not an invitation to haggle for getting retroactive credit for quiz questions. The focus on the discussion should be increasing your understanding of the course material, and why one answer is "more correct" that the other choices.
Be an interactive student, not just a passive lurker who takes the quizzes and reads the listserver messages but does not communication each class with the instructor. In addition to responding to the questions, ask questions about things related to Virginia that interest you. Respond to listserver comments with your own experiences or point of view. Make suggestions regarding additional material or activities that other students might enjoy. Comment on recent news with a geography twist, or other courses you have taken where the material has a geography component (especially history, biology, geology, etc.).
I summarize comments/questions and forward some (but not all) messages directly to the other partipants in the class via the VIRGINIA-GEOGRAPHY-L listserver. That listserver stores the messages that I distribute throughout the semester in the achive, so you can refer to that material when researching answers to quiz/Final Exam questions.
I don't use a chat room in this class. Experience has taught me that I must moderate the electronic discussion in order to focus on the course materials and eliminate flame wars ("I'm right; she's stupid. I can't imagine how Jane Doe could believe..."). Discussions about the Civil War and the Confederate flag can generate a lot of message traffic without adding any new insights - but surprisingly, the hottest-and-least-illuminating interaction in previous classes was a flame war over littering.
NOTE: Administrative/logistical questions are also welcomed ("there's a broken link on this page" or "can we meet on Thursday to review the material on watershed divides?"), but those messages don't count towards the 150 points.
250 points will come from the final exam. It will be a test of your cumulative knowledge, examining topics from every week in the class. If you have a short-term memory but no ability to integrate information from different weeks, be forewarned - what we studied in Week 1 will be relevant to the Final Exam questions. However, you'll have 12 quizzes under your belt, and by the end of the semester you'll have new expertise. (Hey, ain't that one reason to to pay the tuition?)
Extra Credit
You can earn some extra credit by answering extra questions that will appear on some of the quizzes. Extra credit questions can raise your overall quiz score, and they can't hurt if you miss them.
