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Honor Code Policy for Advanced Experimental Molecular Biology
Please carefully read over the following policy before
beginning work on your lab notebook and PowerPoint presentation.
If you are in doubt then ask the Instructor, NOT a TA
or fellow students.
***NOTE: Policy for my other courses may differ***
This lab course requires BOTH greater independence and teamwork
than BIOS 311 and 312. You are
expected to analyze, interpret, and present your work as a
TEAM using PowerPoint.
Laboratory Notebook (INDIVIDUAL Effort)
- All corrections must be indicated in the notebook when
the mistakes are discovered; making changes on the "copies"
or the original notebook pages AFTER the fact is an honor
code violation.
- Do not attempt to "line-up" the copy page under the original
to make a correction.
- All notebook entries must be dated with the actual date;
that is, you cannot "pre-date" or "post-date" pages to agree
with a particular lab session.
- The notebook is a "real-time" record of the procedures,
problems, and results that occur during lab; you are not
allowed to come to lab with the protocols already written
in your notebook.
- The notebook must contain evidence that you personally
did the manipulations required to calculate all of the data
presented.
- Although the notebooks will contain similar data, the presentation
of this data and how it was obtained, as well as the Purpose
and Introduction of each lab, experiment summaries, and conclusions,
must be unique to each student.
PowerPoint presentation preparation (TEAM Effort)
- You will present your findings in a PowerPoint Presentation.
You have a great degree of flexibility as to how you prepare
your work; each team's poster should be unique in organization
and style.
- The major restriction is that EACH
TEAM must individually create all text, tables, graphs,
and figures that are presented AND draw their
own conclusions.
You must write each section of the presentation entirely on
your own. The Instructor needs to know your own understanding
of the concepts in your own words. NEVER quote directly from
ANY source, and never paraphrase someone else's interpretation.
- Discuss strategies for data preparation and
interpretation ONLY with the other members of your TEAM.
- DO NOT LET ANYONE ELSE "PROOFREAD" YOUR POSTER.
- RAW data may be exchanged freely among CURRENT class participants, including photographs or photocopies of original gels.
Written reference material
- You may consult your notebook, the course web site, reference
readings, textbooks, review articles, and primary sources
(published research papers).
- You may NOT consult another student's lab paper or PowerPoint
presentation, from this year or from any previous year.
- You may not consult my comments on past presentations or
notebooks. In fact, those comments may be inappropriate for
the current lab.
- To protect yourself and others from possible plagiarism please
do not allow anyone access to your notebook or computer files.
The Rice Honor Code allows proper and improper conduct to
be defined for each course. Since the learning value of your
work in the laboratory is considerably enhanced by appropriate
collaboration on data preparation and interpretation, some
collaboration is allowed and even encouraged. Unfortunately
there are occasional abuses. It is very frustrating to an instructor
who has prepared an effective lab course to discover that students
have shirked their responsibilities for learning. It is also
a sickening feeling to have to turn someone in for an honor
code violation.
Copyright, Acknowledgements, and Intended
Use
Created by B. Beason (bbeason@rice.edu),
Rice University, 29 June 1999
Updated 29 June 2006