Spring Semester 2017
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MCMP 208: Biochemistry for Pharmaceutical Sciences I

Spring Semester 2017 11:30 am - 12:20 pm MWF 210 Matthews Hall

GENERAL INFORMATION AND POLICIES

Last revised January 6, 2017

Instructors: Drs. Curtis L. Ashendel and Casey Krusemark

Teaching Assistants: Mark Westbroek and Aswathy Chandran

General: MCMP 208 is a standard one-semester undergraduate course in human biochemistry.

Learning objectives: The overall objectives of this course are to increase students’ biochemical understanding and knowledge and their ability to apply that understanding and knowledge. This requires the students in this course to learn and understand the terminology, facts, concepts, and formulaic processes, and to become skilled at applying what they have learned. On the course web site, a list is provided of learning objectives for each topic that is scheduled to be covered. For each topic, the learning objective list is grouped by type of learning (Facts, Formulaic Processes, and Concepts). Exams and quizzes are based on the learning objectives.

Prerequisite courses: Two semesters of organic Chemistry and one semester of Biology that includes cellular biology. A list of prerequisite concepts is on the course web site.

Course requirements: The grade for this course is based only on points earned on examinations and quizzes. There is no homework though one or more quizzes may be “take home.” Attendance is not required. These are explained separately and in more detail below.

Required Textbook: Biochemistry: The Molecular Basis Of Life, 6^th Edition, T. McKee and J.R. McKee, Oxford University Press, 201. ISBN-9780190209896.

Assigned text readings: There is REQUIRED reading in the textbook for EVERY topic covered. A general list of chapters covered in this course is shown on the final page of this syllabus (“Subjects Covered by Unit.”)

Course web site (MCMP 208 does NOT use Blackboard): http://claserve.mcmp.purdue.edu/MCMP208

Some content on the course web site (practice quizzes, slides, and score look-up) require the student log in using their career account/myPurdue user ID (alias) and a password that is specific for MCMP 208. To set a new MCMP 208 password or change one’s existing MCMP 208 password, an access code must be used on a special web page. A small web form is provided on the MCMP 208 course web site home page for requesting an Authorization Code. When so requested, an authorization code is sent by email to the student’s Purdue email account. This email will also contain a URL link for the web page to use the authorization code to set or change one’s MCMP 208 password. The authorization code can be used only once to set a new or changed password. An authorization code does not need to be used, however. If an authorization code was requested but is not used, it does not affect anything. An authorization code can be requested at any time, even if the last authorization code was not used. However, if the authorization code is used to set a new or changed password, it cannot be used again since it can only be used once. If the process of setting a new or changed MCMP 208 password must be done again, a new authorization code must be requested using the web form. An authorization code is not the same as an MCMP 208 password. The authorization code cannot be used when logging in to access slides, practice quizzes or scores. The authorization code has only one use: to set an MCMP 208 password. Only the MCMP 208 password can be used to access scores, slides, etc.

Lecture attendance and courtesy: Attendance of lectures is not required and will not be recorded. However, quiz scores are used in calculating grades, and students must be present for quizzes on most Fridays. All students are expected to respect the right of the other students to listen and learn during lecture. Audible conversations, cell phone ringing noise, other noises from personal electronics, arriving late, and leaving early are extremely inconsiderate. Students exhibiting such behavior will be asked to leave.

Lecture recordings: Lectures will be recorded and digital audio encodings will be available. They will be available to view on the Echo360 web site (http://echo360.com with further login instructions on the MCMP 208 course website home page.) Archives of slides presented in lecture are also provided on the course website. Under no circumstances will any student be given a private lecture by the instructor. Students desiring to hear a lecture again should listen to one of these recordings.

Lecture questions and comments: Questions and corrections are always welcome during lectures. Another opportunity to ask the instructor questions is immediately before and after each lecture, though there is usually only a little time available then. However, please be aware that there is an active microphone on the podium at the front of the lecture hall. Since this microphone is always on, questions and comments to the instructor at the podium immediately before or after lecture will be picked up by that microphone and recorded and will be available to others in the class via recordings. Students are cautioned against revealing any confidential information when engaged in a conversation with the instructor near the podium. Questions of a confidential nature should be discussed with the instructor or a teaching assistant during a private meeting at some other – more private – location, such as outside the building or at an office meeting set up by making an appointment.

Lecture slides: The instructors will post their lecture slides to the course web site soon after each lecture. They will be in a format suitable for viewing on the web, as well as for printing. As a courtesy to the students, the instructors also will try to post a draft version of his/her lecture slides in advance of each lecture to assist the students with note-taking during lecture. Due to unforeseen scheduling and coordination problems, is not guaranteed and the draft versions of slides may not be available before every lecture. Remember, the pre-lecture slides are not intended for students to use to study the material before lectures; the required readings – textbook and/or other readings – should be used for studying before lectures. Though every effort will be made to prevent errors in slides posted prior to lecture, any errors found in the draft slides will be corrected when a final version of the slides is posted after lecture to the slide archives on the course web site. The slides posted after lecture will remain available throughout the semester, while the draft version of slides posted before lecture will be removed from the web site after each lecture. The slides posted to the web contain copyrighted figures, and so access to slides will be restricted to enrollees by requiring students to log in with their career account/myPurdue login user ID (alias) and their MCMP 208 password.

Office hours: Instructors will be available for consultation on a walk-in basis during their office hours. No appointment is needed for the office hours. The instructors will maintain regular weekly office hours during the weeks in which they lecture. Dr. Ashendel and Dr. Krusemark will hold office hour at 12:30 to 1:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays when lecturing with some exceptions. Times, locations, exceptions about office hours is posted on the course web site immediately under the instructor’s pictures. Additional consultations with the instructors may be arranged via appointment. The TA office hours and locations will be announced and posted on the course web site. Students should contact the instructors or TA(s) to schedule meeting times if they cannot make the scheduled office hours.

Email to instructors and Teaching Assistants (TAs): Students are encouraged to send comments, corrections, and questions to the instructors and/or TAs via email. The instructors’ and TAs' email addresses are posted as links on the course web page. In addition to regular email, an anonymous mailer web application allows for students to send email anonymously to either of the course instructors. It is provided for students who wish to make comments to the instructor but who do not want to be identified. A link to the web form for this application and instructions on its use are on the course web site. It is not possible for the instructors to respond directly to the sender of anonymous email. However, when it may benefit the entire class, a response to questions emailed anonymously will be sent to the entire class.

Email announcements: From time to time the instructors may make announcements pertaining to the course via email. All students officially enrolled in the course will receive such emails via their Purdue email account. It is the responsibility of students to check their email account on a daily basis or more frequently in order to receive these announcements in a timely manner. In certain cases, answers to questions emailed to the instructor will be made anonymous and emailed to the entire class so everyone can benefit from the answer.

Help sessions: There will be one instructor help session and one TA help session during the 2 to 3 day period before each exam. Also, a TA help session is scheduled on Thursdays before each quiz. The format of all help sessions will be questions and answers. A general review of large amounts of material will not be possible. Attendance at help sessions is voluntary and no new material will be presented. The times and places of all help sessions (except for the final exam) are listed elsewhere in this syllabus as well as posted on the course web site. Help sessions for exams also will be announced in lecture before the exam. The help sessions for the final exam will be announced after they are scheduled.

Course grade: The course grade for each student is based solely on the total points earned as follows:

The course grade for each student either is based on a "straight scale" or is based on a “modified straight scale” that depends on the class average. The modified straight scale is used ONLY if the class average is less than 75%. The actual course grade cutoffs used for grades may be lower than those indicated below (resulting in higher grades for some students.) The grade cutoffs actually used will not be disclosed.

A grade of "Incomplete" will not be given in this course.

The class average used to trigger and set the modified straight scale grade cutoffs will be calculated without including any extra credit. Each student’s grade calculation, however, will be done with point totals that include extra credit. However, point ranges (cutoffs) for each grade will be calculated from percentages based on 100% = 428 points.

Questions about grading policy and grades should be directed to the instructor in charge of the course. Students are encouraged to seek assistance of their academic adviser and the instructor in charge of the course in rare cases involving lifetime emergencies (e.g., you are in a major incapacitating accident or you have a life-threatening illnesses involving extended hospital stays) that cause significant but unavoidable absences.

Academic dishonesty policy The first incident of academic dishonesty will result in the assignment of an ‘F’ grade for the course and expulsion from the course. Academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to the following: copying from other students' quizzes or exams; using notes, books, handouts, information stored in any electronic device (programmable calculators, cell phones, computers, etc.) during in-class quizzes or during examinations; requesting reevaluation (re-grading) of any work that has been altered after it was graded; and representing anyone else's work as your own.

If any take-home quizzes are assigned, students may work on them in groups. However the answers to take-home quizzes submitted for grading must be written individually by each student. The submission of photocopied or hand-copied answers is considered academic dishonesty. Since the basis for determining this is the distinctiveness of your answers, it is each student's responsibility to make sure that they submit answers that are distinctly their own. If you wish to quote the text (or the author of any publication, even a web site) you must indicate the author and source of the quoted passage. Using the work of others (even just the ideas or a single short phrase) but failing to attribute authorship of that work to its author constitutes plagiarism, and this is academically dishonest.

Exams: There are four exams held during the semester. Each exam covers the material presented since the previous exam. The fourth exam is held during final exam week but is not cumulative. Students will be given one hour and 10 to 15 minutes (70 to 75 minutes) to complete each of the four exams, including the exam held during final exam week. The first three exams are scheduled for 6:20 to 7:35 PM. These exams will be passed out beginning at 6:20 and will start no later than 6:25pm, not at 6:30pm as it may show on your calendars. For each of the first three exams, one lecture has been canceled. 75 minutes will be allowed for Exam 4, which will begin at the time scheduled by the university, will be announced around the middle of the semester. However, final exam week includes Saturday, so students should be prepared to remain on campus through Saturday.

Exams may contain problems worth up to (approximately) 25% involving drawing and/or recognition of molecular structures. Up to 35% of the points on each exam will require drawing a structure or diagram, writing an essay or short answer, or completing a table. The remainder of the points on each exam will be for computer-graded problems (usually 3 points each; multiple choice and matching.) Exams are written based on the stated learning objectives for the units covered by the exam, with the points approximately distributed across question types in proportion to the type of learning indicated for each subject.

Exams and quizzes are not "open book" and the textbook or notes of any kind may NOT be used during exams or quizzes. No calculation problems involving other than very simple arithmetic will be on the exams or quizzes. The use of electronic devices of any kind – including calculators, computers, cell phones, PDAs, digital recorders or music players - is not allowed during exams and quizzes. To prevent even the appearance of using such prohibited electronic devices, all electronic devices should be left at home or kept stored inside backpack, purses, bags, or pockets. Once an exam or quiz has been distributed, students are not allowed to leave the room (no bathroom breaks) until they have submitted their exam or quiz for grading.

Students will submit both the exam and the answer sheet (for computer grading, aka Scantron) when they have completed the exam or no time for taking the exam remains. It is the students’ responsibility to mark the answer sheet completely and accurately. The answer sheet is scored by computer based on how it was submitted by the student and no change is allowed to the scantron or the exam after it has been submitted.

Students may be excused from an exam only (not quizzes) only when certain criteria have been met. The primary criterion for an excuse from an exam is if the student physically cannot sit and take the exam when scheduled (a) without disrupting the rest of the class by vomiting or having any other type disruptive heath crises beyond the student’s control; (b) without causing serious endangerment of the student or others in the class as directed by medical personnel; OR (c) because of legal confinement or medical quarantine of the student. Documentation may be requested by Dr. Ashendel. This list of acceptable reasons is not completely exhaustive, since life can be strange. However, a student will NOT be excused from an exam for short-term health issue (up to two weeks in length) that exists only PRIOR to the exam because lecture recordings are available and because cramming for exams is discouraged since studying for class should be done every day, not just in the period immediately prior to the exam. Any student seeking to be excused from an exam MUST contact the instructor in charge of the test (or, preferably, Prof. Ashendel) before the exam to determine if the student is eligible to be excused from an exam. In some rare emergency circumstances when a discussion in advance of the exam is impossible, contact about the problem must be made as soon as such contact is possible, and generally this should be within a few hours after the problem occurred. Failure to make contact with Dr. Ashendel in advance (or shortly after, in RARE emergency circumstance) makes the student ineligible for being excused from the exam.

Teaching assistants, academic advisers, and University administrators cannot excuse you from taking an exam at the assigned time. Only Dr. Ashendel, or the instructor in charge of the exam may excuse a student from taking an exam.

By University policy, students with three or more exams scheduled for the same day during final exam week may request that one of them be rescheduled to an alternative day so to reduce their examination load to no more than two exams in any one day. Contact Prof. Ashendel if this applies to you.

A student may only be excused from a maximum of one exam in MCMP 208, even if there is a 3 exam conflict during final exam week. Students who need to miss two or more exams in this class due to health/emergency/personal issues should seek a medical/administrative withdrawal from the course. If this applies to you, contact your academic advisor.

The policy for an excused absence from an exam in MCMP 208 is that NO make-up exams will be provided and the excused student's course grade will be based on a calculated score for the excused exam. In such cases, the calculated score for the excused exam will be the score that does not alter the ranking (percentile) for that student. In other words, the course grade will be based on the remainder of the students work. The excused student’s performance rank in class will not be affected by the absence of a score for the excused exam. Another way to view an excused exam is that while it will not cause the student’s rank in the class to go down, it will not go up either, and thus is a lost opportunity to improve one’s grade in the class.

Practice quizzes: To achieve the objective of the course, it is important that every biochemistry topic presented in lecture be understood and learned by most of the students. Some biochemistry topics are more challenging to learn than others. To obtain useful information about student learning, practice quizzes will be offered on-line. These will be similar in format to regular quizzes, but may have more questions and will be administered on-line (accessed via the course web site). These will be offered on Wednesday every week when there is a Friday quiz. Access will be provided via the course web site. Practice quizzes will be opened shortly after the end of the lecture and will close the afternoon of the next day (Thursday) so that the results may be used as guidance for the TA quiz help session scheduled for Thursday. Keys will be made available on-line after the practice quiz closes. Practice quizzes will have at least one question for each major topic covered since the last exam or quiz. The results of student performance on the quiz will help the instructors determine if supplemental instruction is needed for any topic. Students may also use the results of their practice quizzes to identify areas where understanding/learning is weak. Any supplemental instruction provided by the instructors will be announced by email and may take a variety of forms from on-line explanation to a review of the topic in a specially scheduled help session. The TA running the Thursday help session for each quiz also will consider the Practice Quiz results during those help sessions. Students are strongly encouraged to take each of the practice quizzes. Obtaining useful statistics about student learning requires that sizable number of students take each practice quiz Therefore, encouragement is provided to students to take practice quizzes in the form of a reward of 0.5 point of extra credit for each practice quiz completed. Students must log in with their career account in order to take each practice quiz. Except for the extra credit earned by each student, performance on the practice quizzes or failure to take a practice quiz will not enter into the calculation of course scores and grades.

Quizzes: The goal of weekly quizzes is to motivate students to stay current with reviewing the lecture material and text readings. Eleven quizzes are scheduled to be held in class every Friday except the first week and last week of the semester and during weeks with an hourly exam. Generally, in-class quizzes will focus on the material covered since the end of the material covered on the prior exam or quiz. Quizzes usually are held in the first 10-15 minutes of class, typically consist of four questions, and are computer graded. Only quiz answer sheets are turned in and the quizzes may be kept by the students. It is each student's responsibility to check the answer sheet to make sure it has been filled in properly (including administrative information such as name and quiz version number). No change to an answer sheet is permitted after it has been submitted and the quiz score is based on the scantron as submitted. Failure by a student to complete the quiz or exam answer sheet accurately and completely likely will result in a lower score awarded for that quiz or exam, which is the penalty for not following instructions. In-class quizzes are not "open book" and the text and notes of any kind may not be used. Use of any kind of calculator or electronic device also is prohibited. For each student, his or her lowest two quiz scores will not be added into his or her semester point total. In other words, only the best nine of the eleven quiz scores for each student will count towards a student’s course grade. Because of this, there are absolutely no make-ups for quizzes for any reason. Some quizzes may be "take-home", in which case the due dates and other specifics will be announced in class.

Return of graded quizzes and exams: Exam 4 will not be returned to the students. The computer graded answer sheets from in-class quizzes and all exams are not returned to the students. Exams 1 to 3 and take-home quizzes (if any) will be returned to students in class with an indication of their score on them. Since computer-graded quizzes and exam 4 will not be returned, students will not be informed directly of their scores on these, but students may use the score look-up web application to determine their scores. Each of exams 1 to 3 and any take-home quizzes will be returned to students by being sorted alphabetically, divided into four groups by section of the alphabet, and placed in stacks around the room lecture hall at the end of a lecture. Any exam or take-home quiz not picked up in lecture will be retained by the TAs and must be picked up from the TAs at some other time. Scores for exams and take-home quizzes will not be directly visible to the other students during the process of returning these. However, all students are entitled to privacy about their scores, and any student that does not want to have their exams and take-home quizzes returned in this manner should tell the instructor or TAs in advance and another method will be arranged for those students who request it.

Score query (look-up) system: Scores and score distributions for each quiz and exam, as well as subtotals, total points, extra credit points, class rank, and calculated course grade will be available via a link on the course web site. Students must log into this system using their career account/myPurdue user ID (alias) and MCMP 208 password.

Exam and quiz keys and re-grades: The key to each exam and in-class quiz is prepared by the professor(s) involved, and will be posted on the course web site shortly after the quiz/exam. Students with questions about the grading of the essay questions on exams 1 to 4 or any take-home quiz should see the Teaching Assistants. Scantrons (for in-class quizzes, computer graded questions of any exam) and the entire fourth exam will not be considered for re-grading. In other words, only the answers to take-home quizzes (if any) and the answers to the essay/short answer exam questions (on the first three exams) will be considered for re-grading. The request to re-grade an answer should be made to the TA who graded the specific question for which the answer score is disputed. Students must make this request in person with the appropriate TA. The list of questions graded by each TA will be provided when the exams are returned after grading. Potential arithmetic errors (summing of scores) should be directed to any TA. Time limit for requesting exam or take-home quiz re-grades (or correcting arithmetic errors): No take-home quizzes or exams will be accepted for re-grading more than two weeks after the return of the exam or take-home quiz to the class.

Course and instructor evaluations: To provide time for thoughtful responses and also for confidentiality, electronic questionnaires will be used for evaluating each course instructor and the course. These will be opened for periods of approximately two weeks and this will be announced in class and via class email. A link will be posted for these on the course web site. Your responses will be anonymous and will not be linked with your name or identifying information. However, a record will be kept of who has completed each evaluation. To encourage participation in these evaluations, 5 points of extra credit will be given for completing all of these evaluations. These extra credit points will be added after calculating the class average used to trigger the modified straight scale but will be added when determining the score and course grade for each student. All responses are confidential, and the responses are not provided to Prof. Ashendel until after the grades for the course have been submitted to the Registrar.

Reservation to make changes: In the event of a major campus emergency involving the cancellation of class sessions, the above requirements, deadlines and grading policies may be subject to changes as required in order to deal with such an emergency situation. Any such changes in this course will be posted on the course website once the course resumes, or can be obtained by contacting the instructor via email or phone.

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