I'm sorry it took me so long to grade the PhysioEx assignments. They're only slightly more fun to grade than they are to do.

Now for some castigation. I realize that some of you work together on the PhysioEx assignments, and I even said that that's okay. But that does NOT mean that it's okay to write exactly the same response to questions as another student. That is NEVER okay to do, unless the assignment is a group assignment. Even if it's not with bad intent, such practice is plagiarism, which is SERIOUS academic misconduct. I didn't dock anyone any points for it, but THIS WILL BE THE ONLY TIME. From now on, ALL individual answers need to be put into your own words. If I see duplication again, the VERY LEAST that WILL happen is that all students involved will receive a zero with no chance of making it up. What CAN happen is that all students involved are thrown out of PC. Don't mistake my extravagant use of capital letters as anger. I realize no one was intentionally cheating. I just want you to realize that I am laying down the law, so it will not be tolerated again.

I'll be posting a PDF of some reproductive models that might help you out. The PDF will appear under Course Materials.

Enjoy the weekend.

I'm sorry, but I won't be able to post your scores until about 11:30 on Thursday morning.

I have received the official word about the questions on Practicum 1. You'll find the breakdown under Official Information. Also, astute readers of the Laboratory Schedule will notice that you are REQUIRED to bring your textbook with you to the laboratory on the day of the practicum.

There will be an OPEN LABORATORY period on Friday 27 February from 09:30 to noon.

Because at least one of you is having a problem with the VBR MP3's, I've replaced the High Quality versions of the lecture recordings with CBR's. If you've had any problems, then go back and download the replacements. If you don't know whether there's a problem, because you haven't yet downloaded any lectures since the last test, then you are falling behind, and you should expect your next test score to reflect that.

See the new link about sound files cutting off (under Technical Issues).

First, though there are unfortunately two versions of the Hormone Project Description and Worksheet floating around out there (one that says the worksheet is due Week 7 and one that says Week 10), the OFFICIAL due date is Week 10 for the Hormone Worksheet. Notice that the individual Vascular Project is also due Week 10. That project is much less work, and I'll talk about it in the laborat'ry.

Second, there is now a link (under Assignments and Scores) for some references that you might find helpful in working on the hormone project.

Enjoy the weekend.

I'm sure that most of you are at least as disappointed as I am by the scores on Examination 1. As a class, your mean score was, I think, the lowest I've seen for this test. By comparison, my last two BIO202 classes' means for Examination 1 were 70.2% and 78.3%. I'm not mentioning this to add to your misery. I just want to arm you with as much information as possible so you can make the adjustments that will be NECESSARY if you want to improve your test scores. By monitoring the website traffic, I noticed that much of the BIO202 traffic occurred within the last few days. This means that many of you are waiting until the last few days before studying for the test. This is exactly what I told students NOT to do. If you continue to put off studying, you can expect your scores to remain the same as this one. You should expect to have to put in a couple hours of study each day to do well. (By the way, I mean a couple of hours of undistracted, concentrated study. That does not mean spending a couple hours with the book open somewhere near you while you answer several cell phone calls.) Another thing I noticed by monitoring the website traffic is that not too many students even looked at (let alone read) the page of tips for how to succeed. Read that page as soon as you're done reading this message, then be honest with yourself when you consider how many of those things you did NOT do. There's really only one reason I wrote those tips, and that's because they work. So if you ask how you can improve, I'm just going to refer you to that page. Those are my best ideas. It's all about time management. If there is no way for you to put in the necessary hours outside of class, then there will almost certainly be no improvement in your scores. I don't want to see that happen. I want all of you to succeed in this course. But you're simply going to have to cut something out of your life, bite the bullet, and put the time in for this course. While you're doing all of that, however, remember that this first test is just one of six, and that it represents only 100 of 1065 points for the semester. There definitely is still time to recover from this, so PLEASE don't be discouraged.

http://www.pc.maricopa.edu/Biology/thoffman/CommonGlobal/Study.html

With Lecture Examination 1 coming up on Monday, I don't want you diverting precious study time to PhysioEx. Therefore, PhysioEx 8 will be due Week 5. There will be no lab that week, though, so you'll have to submit your PhysioEx packets to the Biology Department. Use the same guidelines as for submitting late assignments (only it won't be late if it's submitted by the day of your normal lab meeting on Week 5).

http://www.pc.maricopa.edu/Biology/thoffman/commonglobal/lateassignments.html

I've scrapped the idea of posting WAV's and MP3's on the Lectures page. All lectures are now MP3's, and you have a choice of High and Low Quality. The Low Quality recordings are the same as the MP3's were before. The High Quality recording are the same quality as the WAV's were, but since they're now MP3's, you should be able to use them on portable players.