BIO112 Principles of Biology II
Spring 2018
Syllabus
Dr. Barry K. Rhoades (Section 1)
106 Munroe Science Center
Office Phone: 757-5238
Office hours: Monday 9:00 - 10:00 AM
Tuesday 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Wednesday 9:00 - 10:00 AM
Thursday 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Friday 9:00 - 10:00 AM
or by appointment
(I will be in or near my office during these times. Feel free to drop in any other time from 9:00 to 5:00 weekdays. When I am not in my offices, I am often in my lab spaces (MSC 101/103) or in the general biology lab (MSC 128).
Textbook: BIOLOGY (11th Ed.) by Neal Campbell and Jane Reese 2017. Pearson/Benjamin/Cummings.
Lab Manual: Principles of Biology II Laboratory Manual. 2018. Wesleyan College.
A Photographic Atlas for the Biology Laboratory. Van de Graaf and Crawley.
Morton Publishing Co. (recommended)
Class Meeting: Section 1 Period 2 (MWF 10:00-10:50 AM) MSC 128
Section 2 Period B (TR 9:45-11:00 AM) MSC 128
Laboratory Meeting: Section 1 Monday, Periods 6-8 (2:30-5:20 PM)
Section 2 Tuesday, Periods D-E (3:00-5:45 PM)
Prerequisites: Successful completion of BIO110, or a comparably rigorous survey of basic biochemistry, genetics, evolution, population biology, and ecology is an absolute prerequisite for this course.
Course Description and Objectives: Principles of Biology II is a four credit hour course designed to familiarize prospective biology majors and other interested students with the unity and diversity of the living organisms that inhabit the earth and to examine the structures and processes used by living things to accomplish the requirements of continued existence. This is a required course for biology majors and a prerequisite for higher level Biology courses. Successful completion of Principles of Biology I (BIO110) or an equivalent course is an absolute prerequisite.
Course Content: The course provides an introduction to the immense diversity of biological systems in the context of evolutionary, genetic, and ecological relationships. It also includes a systematic survey of the major groups of organisms from the bacteria through the eukaryotes, and our current understanding of the morphological, physiological, and phylogenetic relationships between groups. The lecture and laboratory components of the course are strongly interrelated and mutually supportive.
Wesleyan College Statement on Disabilities: Wesleyan College is committed to equal education, full participation and access to facilities for all students. Any student who requires reasonable academic accommodations or the use of auxiliary aids in class must first identify herself to the Director of the First Year Experience and Students in Transition who serves as the Student Disability Coordinator prior to the first day of class in the semester in which she desires to receive accommodations. Documentation by a qualified physician must be provided and will be reviewed to ensure the documentation meets the college requirements. If reasonable accommodations are established, the student is expected to collaborate with each of her professors within the first week of class to determine how the accommodations will be implemented. Accommodations will not be retroactively administered for the semester. Accommodations that decrease the integrity of a course will not be approved. Please contact Christy Henry in the Academic Center for additional information or to seek services.
If you have any disability, documented or otherwise, which might reasonably affect your ability to participate in any course activities, please consult privately with the instructor prior to the end on the drop/add period (2nd week of the course).
Wesleyan College Department of Biology Policy on the Honor Code: All students of Wesleyan College have agreed to abide by the Wesleyan College Honor Code and strict enforcement of the Honor Code will be practiced by all Biology faculty. Any violation of the Honor Code including plagiarism or cheating on exams, quizzes or any assignment will not be tolerated and will be reported to the Wesleyan College Honor Court. Cheating (giving or receiving any unauthorized information or supplying information from any source other than your memory) on any exam will result in a course semester grade of F. Plagiarism and/or improper citation on any assignment will be dealt with on a case by case basis, but also may result in an F grade for the assignment or the course. If you are unclear about violation of the Honor Code for any assignment, you should contact the instructor before handing in the assignment. If you have ANY questions as to what would constitute cheating/plagiarism for either the take-home exams or the laboratory Data Sheets, it is your responsibility to clarify this with the instructor.
Attendance: You are expected to attend classes and laboratory sessions regularly. Excessive unexcused absences (more than 4) from class and/or lab will be reported to the Dean in accordance with college policy and may result in a penalty of one full grade point.
Wesleyan College Statement on Classroom Behavior: Rude, disruptive and/or disrespectful behaviors as determined by the faculty member interfere with other students’ rights and with the instructor’s ability to teach. Therefore, anyone exhibiting unacceptable behaviors during the class will be asked to leave and will be counted absent for that class period. Failure to cooperate with this process will result in disciplinary action that may include withdrawal from the class or dismissal from the College.
Wesleyan College Statement on Educational Privacy: In order to promote an environment in which ideas may be freely expressed, the interior office and classroom spaces at Wesleyan are private spaces. The unauthorized creation of photographic images, audio or video recordings of students or faculty in these spaces is considered to be disruptive behavior which may result in a student's removal from class according to the instructor’s discretion. The distribution of any such recordings of students or faculty without the express written permission of the College is strictly prohibited and is subject to disciplinary action by the Provost of the College.
All novel materials developed and presented in this course are the academic and intellectual property of the course instructor, course students, and/or Wesleyan College. Unauthorized photography, recording, electronic monitoring, and/or web dissemination of any portions of class or laboratory materials or sessions potentially violates the legitimate expectations of privacy of your classmates and the course instructor. Please obtain the explicit permission of the instructor before making any video or audio recordings in this course. Please do not, under any circumstances, post recordings from this class to electronic or social media.
Cell Phones: Please do your classmates the courtesy of turning off your cell phones during class and lab periods. If you must answer your cell phone, please leave the room to do so. If you leave the room, please do not come back. If you feel that you must monitor your cell phone during class or lab, please get permission from the instructor.
Preparation and Participation: It is very important that you come to class each day having read through the assigned readings for that week. It is even more important that you come to laboratory meetings having read through the laboratory exercise in detail. I hope to make our class sessions very interactive. The more preparation you bring into class, the more easily and productively you will be able to interact with me and your classmates, and the more you will learn.
The laboratory guides are accessible online through the course website - note: not through the campus portal. You are responsible for printing each lab guide, reviewing it to familiarize yourself with the lab exercises, and bringing your printed copy with you to each lab session. If you do not prepare for each lab, you will waste a great deal of your limited lab time trying to figure out what you should be looking at and what you should be doing, instead of helping your partners complete the lab and learning the material.
Time Expenditure: There is a general expectation at Wesleyan that you will spend at least two and ideally three or more hours working outside of class for every semester hour of credit. For this course, this amounts to a minimum of eight hours per week in addition to the three hours of class time and three hours of lab time. The laboratory materials are available to you at all hours in room 128 (excepting use of that room by other laboratory sessions), precisely so that you can spend much of this time working directly with them to practice with new terminology and specimens. For a variety of sound reasons, this may be one of the most demanding courses you take at Wesleyan. Reconcile yourself to this and allow yourself adequate study time.
Grading: The semester grade will be computed on the following basis:
Lecture Lab TOTAL Grade Midterm Exam I 9% 4% 90% + A Midterm Exam II 12% 5% 80%-89% B Midterm Exam III 14% 6% 70%-79% C Final Exam (cumulative) 18% 7% 60%-69% D Weekly Quizzes 10% <60% F Projects 5% Laboratory Worksheets 10% TOTAL 100%
Late Penalty: The penalty for late assignments is 10% per day (including weekends), with extensions given only for serious medical reasons or family emergencies. I maintain this policy to be fair to those students who respect deadlines and do not ask for extensions, even though they may not be turning in their best quality work or performing at their highest level.
Testing Format: Because lecture and lab materials are highly integrated, lecture and lab tests will be given together during regularly scheduled lab periods (see below). The lecture exams will include some objective style questions such as fill in the blanks and identify or define the terms given. Each exam may include a few multiple choice questions. In addition there will be essay style questions of two types. The first is a basic describe/explain - compare/contrast type. The other essay style question that I may ask is a synthesis question, wherein you will need to apply your acquired knowledge to solve some novel problem or respond to some hypothetical situation. I will cover the exam format in greater detail in class as the first exam approaches.
Laboratory exams will involve a series of practical stations which will test your working knowledge of the specimens, biological relationships, instruments, and ideas which you have explored in the lab. Here too, I will explain the format in greater detail in lab.
Quizzes may contain short answer, fill-in-the-blank, matching, multiple choice, and/or true/false questions. They are designed primarily to give you feedback on how well you are keeping up with the material in the course. Quizzes may be administered in a traditional paper format, via the PRS system which the instructor will be using to enhance Powerpoint presentations, and/or derived from the online Mastering Biology site that accompanies your Campbell textbook. Quiz times will be announced at least two days in advance.
During the course of the semester you will conduct several small individual or group projects. Each of these will require you to spend 1-4 hours outside of class and produce materials which you will then present during a class sesion. In general, a thoughtful and informative job on a project will earn you all of the available points.
I will make every effort to return exams and quizzes to you within one week. This means that you should expect to have your graded exam returned in the lab session following the one in which you took the exam.
Laboratory Worksheets: These will be short (1-2 page) worksheets which you will complete during and after each laboratory and turn in at the start of the next laboratory session. These are designed to make sure that you diligently work through the laboratory exercises, think about what you learned in the lab, understand any experimental methods and results from the lab, and are prepared for the laboratory portion of each exam. A few of the labs will have an additional component consisting of a writeup of data analysis from lab results.
Laboratory Cleanup: You will be expected (required!) to clean up your work area after each laboratory exercise.
Class and Lab Schedule: Note: this is a tentative schedule and is subject to change. This is the first year of a significant reorganization and reworking of both the content and the instructional methods for the introductory biology sequence courses at Wesleyan, so there are bound to be a few changes as we go along. I will keep you posted from week to week as to what we will be covering the following week so that you may keep pace with your reading assignments as listed below.
Some laboratory exercises will extend over more than a single lab period and may require you to come in outside of lab time to gather data. Some exercises may take place in locations other that the class/laboratory room, for example outdoors in the the Wesleyan Arboretum.
2018 Class and Laboratory Schedule
Wk
Date
Class Topic(s)
Chapts.
Lab Sec 1 - Mondays
Lab Sec 2 - Tuesdays
1
Jan 8-12
Evo I: Intro, Phylo, Taxo, Systematics
26
1: Trees & Keys
2
Jan 15
MLK HOLIDAY, no class
23,24
no labs Jan 16-19
Evo II: Pop Genetics, Spec, Extinc
3
Jan 22-26
Evo III: Hist of Life, Biogeo, Mol Syst
25
2: Evolution Sims
4
Jan 29 - Feb 2
Bacteria & Protists
27,28
3: Bact, Prot, Antibio 5
Feb 5-9
Fungi 31 Class/Lab Exam I 6
Feb 12-16
Anim I: Form, Func, Systems
32,40
4: Fungi, Symbiosis
7
Feb 19-23
Anim II: Invert Evol & Diversity 33 5: Inverts I, Life Cycles 8
Feb 26 - March 2
Anim III: Vert Evol & Diversity 34
6: Inverts II, Dissection
March 5-19
SPRING BREAK, no classes
no labs
9
March 12-16 Anim IV: Metabolic Systems 41-45 Class/Lab Exam II 10
March 19-23
Anim V: Repro, Dev, & Responses 46-50 7: Verts I, Dissection 11
March 26-29
March 30
Plants I : Evolution & Diversity
GOOD FRIDAY HOLIDAY, no class
29,30
8: Verts II, Dev & Resp 12
April 2-6
Plants II: Structure, Transport, & Growth
35,36,37
9: Plants I, Symbiosis II 13
April 9-13 Plants III: Reproduction & Response
38,39
Class/Lab Exam II 14 April 16-20
Ecology I: Biomes & Populations 52,53
10: Plants II, Physiology 15 April 23-27
Ecology II: Comms, Ecosys, & Conserv
54,55,56 11: Ecology
16
April 30-May2
course catchup and review
no lab
May 3
READING DAY
Saturday May 5 8:30AM Section 2 Class/Lab Final Exam
Monday May 7 8:30AM Section 1 Class/Lab Final Exam