Skip to content

Policies

Jump to bottom
Leland edited this page Sep 29, 2017 · 6 revisions

Attendance

Attendance is required in lecture, scrum, and crit. As a studio-based course, you learn in Product Studio through the in-person experience of critique and practice, and your absence will not only affect your own learning but the experiences of your teammates and classmates. If you miss a class, lecture, scrum or crit, your grade will automatically be reduced by a half letter grade.

In the real world, you have to pull your weight on teams, show up to meetings on time, etc.—Product Studio is a microcosm of these real-world expectations. If you are flakey about attendance it will definitely upset your teammates and impact your grade via peer feedback.

If for any reason you need to miss class (e.g., illness, religious observance, etc.), please notify the TA for your section. MORE IMPORTANTLY you need to tell your team and offer ways to make your absence up to them (Video into meetings, take on a share of the work, write up notes of your current thinking about a decision being made that week). It is very important that everyone on your team feels that you are pulling your own weight and you are not dragging their performance down with your absence. As a general rule, expect to spend 125-150% of effort to make up for your missed work and to make up for the additional workload on your team needed to keep you up to date.

There are four conditions that must be met in order to not lose half a grade:

  1. Your absence is allowable:
  • Your have a reason recognized by Cornell as a legitimate absence (Religious Observance, Death in immediate family, Birth in immediate family)
  • You are sick/caretaker of someone who is sick and have a doctor's note <-- needed for extended absences only (updated 9/28 LR)
  • You use your one and only one discretionary absence for a compelling reason (Job interview, non-immediate family wedding, etc.)

  1. You tell your team and TA in advance (outstanding exceptional cases, all of the above have some reasonable notice factor)

  2. You agree with your team on work you are going to do and make yourself available remotely. If you are in another timezone, you have to work with your team on what's best for them. (You are up at 2am. Not them.)

  3. You package up the work you did during your absence, write it up, complete outstanding assignments and send to TA before the next class.

If you have to leave early during a Studio Sprint (e.g., to leave by sundown on Friday evening for religious observance), let the Studio Director know so that we can place your team early in the presentation order before you have to leave.

Missing a Sprint will count as two absences, it is an enormous amount of team time to make forward progress and a hallmark of the course. Therefore it will be nearly impossible to miss a sprint and not receive a deduction in your grade.

Religious Observances

Please let the studio director and TA know if you are missing any classes due to Religious Observances this semester during the first week of class. These are absences that can be planned well in advance.

Tardiness

Do not be late to class. For the morning folks, plan on arriving at campus at 9am, grab a coffee, chat with classmates and start the day relaxed and ready to dive in. Otherwise you will be cursing the MTA, arriving late, and unhappy.

Lateness to class will be run Broadway Theater style. For a similar reason, we don't want you disrupting the class. You won't be allowed in after the lecture starts. You will have to wait outside the classroom until a TA lets you in at an appropriate breaking point. Since quizzes are normally taken in the beginning of class, you run the risk of receiving a failing grade for that quiz.

Devices

No typing of any kind, unless if instructed by the lecturer. Typing is distracting and studies have shown you will actually retain and process less information. Bring your devices, but keep them away, under your chair, out of sight. You must use a pen, pencil and paper to take notes. If you are not adhering to this, you will be asked to leave class and will receive an absence.

For those up in arms after reading the above paragraph, here are some alternates to a pen and paper storage system:

  • Preferred: Write with pen and paper and take snapshots on your phone camera after class.
  • Alternate: Surface/iPad/Android tablet, with NO KEYBOARD and only stylus, and only in notes app) talk to your TA if you want to go this route.

A few more words on this:

  • Paper is a killer app: it will never run out of batteries or have a screen freeze half way through class. You can't accidentally delete something. It won't ring, or ping or pester you with constant social-media and email updates.

  • In three studies at Princeton, researchers found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.

  • Another study, published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed that people who doodle can better recall dull information.

  • Writing it down also sparks innovation. Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of brain that are associated with creativity and that innovation is sparked when you complement ‘digital’ with ’physical’.

Clone this wiki locally