Course Description:
Requires participation in weekly departmental colloquium for 1 credit. The full course description, credit hours, and enrollment restrictions can be found at this link.

Purpose and Learning Goals:
Students will be exposed to current research being undertaken by physicists from both the local region and on the national/world stage. In additional to learning about modern research efforts, students will be exposed to a variety of speaking styles and will develop a sense of what makes for an enagaging public talk (and what doesn't).

Materials:
There are no formal course materials. However, some speakers will provide non-technical references for their work ahead of their talk. Students should review these materials in order to make the most of each talk.

Requirements:
For this class you are required to attend the weekly Physics Dept. colloquia (Thursdays at 3:30pm, see the schedule at http://drexel.edu/coas/academics/departments-centers/physics/events/colloquia/ ). There is no other formal meeting time.

For full credit, you must attend N-1 of the colloquium talks and submit brief reflection papers for 3 of them. See details below.

Note that the colloquium schedule is often beyond the control of the instructor. Changes to the schedule are posted to the Physics Department mailing list; non-physics students will need to put in a bit of effort to make sure that they are aware of changes (the instructor will not send out separate reminders). Talks that aren't at the nominal meeting time/day are not required, but can be used to make up for another missed talk. Normally there is no talk during Week 1.

Grading:

Students attending all but one lecture during the quarter will pass with a D+. The instructor will indicate attendance in Blackboard.

Those wishing to achieve a higher grade can do so by turning in written summaries of one or more of the lectures. These summaries must be turned in before the start of the next colloquium. Please submit a PDF document via Blackboard.

Summaries should be 1/2 to 1 page and can be brief, **but should be sufficiently detailed that they would be educational to someone that missed the talk** (300 words isn't enough, but 1000 words is way too long). The summaries should be in prose and not in the form of notes.

Each summary will be graded as 1, 2, or 3. The default grade is a 2. Summaries that are too brief or read too much like notes (e.g., "the speaker went on to say") will get a 1. A score of 3 will be given for summaries that would be suitable to pass on to faculty that were not able to attend the talk, but want to know what it was about.

Each "point" will correspond to one +/- on the grading scale. E.g. a grade of 2 on the first summary will increase the grade from D+ to C and a grade of 3 would yield a C+. Students may turn in as many summaries as they wish, but an A- will be the highest grade given if more than 3 summaries are submitted (i.e., if you turn in 3 summaries and get a 3 on each, you can get an A+).

If you plan to submit a summary for a given talk, please do so within one week of the talk (by the next Monday for the last lecture of the quarter since grades will be due). Late papers will have grades reduced by 0.5 per week.

I will post grades on Blackboard. Note that a "0" means that you have attended the lecture, but have not submitted a summary of it.

Acadmic Policies:
Students are expected to be familiar with Drexel's policies on
Academic Integrity, Plagiarism, Dishonesty and Cheating: www.drexel.edu/provost/policies/academic_dishonesty.asp,
Course Adding/Dropping: www.drexel.edu/provost/policies/course_drop.asp,
Course Withdrawal: drexel.edu/provost/policies/course-withdrawal,
Incomplete Grades: drexel.edu/provost/policies/incomplete_grades/, and
Grade Appeals: drexel.edu/provost/policies/grade-appeals/.

Students may not copy one another's work. This is considered cheating and will be dealt with in the following manner. The first infraction will result in a zero for all parties involved. The second infraction will result in an F for the course and a report to the office of academic affairs.

Student with disabilities requesting accommodations and services at Drexel University need to present a current accommodation verification letter (AVL) to faculty before accommodations can be made. AVL's are issued by the Office of Disability Resources. For additional information, see drexel.edu/disability-resources/support-accommodationsstudent-family-resources/.

For Health and Counseling needs, students can find further information at
drexel.edu/counselingandhealth/student-health-center/overview/
drexel.edu/counselingandhealth/counseling-center/overview/

Classroom Etiquette:
We will adhere to whatever University COVID protocols may be in place. Currently there are none.

Appropriate Use of Course Materials:
It is important to recognize that some or all of the course materials provided to you may be the intellectual property of Drexel University, the course instructor, or others. Use of this intellectual property is governed by Drexel University policies, including the IT-1 Policy.

Be aware that meetings of this course might be recorded. Any recordings will be available to students registered for this class. Students are expected to follow appropriate university policies and maintain the security of passwords used to access recorded lectures. Recordings, or any part of the recordings, may not be reproduced, shared with those not in the class, or uploaded to other online environments. Doing so may be considered a breach of this policy and will be investigated and addressed as possible academic dishonesty, among other potential violations. Improper use of such materials may also constitute a violation of the University's Code of Conduct and will be investigated as such.

Misc:

Course Changes: changes to the parameters of the course may need to be made during the quarter. In the case of such events, students will be notified by the instructor through their official Drexel e-mail. However, no special arrangements will be made for students that are not in the intended demographic for the class (Physics Seniors) or that are taking this course simply because they need one more credit to graduate.

ChatGPT: I will allow you to use ChatGPT this quarter to help write your summaries (although I would suggest that you don't need its help). The reason that I'm allowing this is that I think that it could be helpful for those that want to understand how they can improve their scores from a 1 or 2 to a 3. Having an AI help with that may be instructive. However, the rules of plagiarism will apply. Specifically you may NOT use more than 5 consecutive words from any other source (ChatGPT or otherwise) without receiving a 0 for your submission. In practice, that means that your summary should not get flagged as "likely written by AI". Since that may not be a clear metric, I'll give a warning the first time it happens (but a 0 the next time).