In writing your syllabus and conveying course policies and information to students, please keep in mind University Writing Program policies and procedures.  Your doing so will not only help ensure program consistency and fairness but will also minimize student anxieties and complaints.

This and related documents are available on the UWP website in the instructor resources section. The UCD Policy and Procedures Manual is available on the web at http://manuals.ucdavis.edu/.

Program Support

UWP Administrators

Questions about these policies or other teaching issues should be addressed to the UWP administrator overseeing your assigned area of the curriculum:

UWP Staff Support

Instructor Responsibilities

Service Period

The service period begins on the first day of the quarter (usually two to three days before the first day of instruction) and ends on the last day of the quarter (the last day of final exam week). If you must leave the area anytime during the service period, you must complete an Academic Special Leave of Absence form (also available outside Mary White’s office, 166 Voorhies) at least seven days in advance of your expected departure. Requests for leaves of more than seven calendar days must be submitted one month in advance and be approved by the Chancellor. Requests for such leaves are granted for legitimate professional and personal reasons, such as a conference, a job interview, family illness, or a significant personal obligation. This form is not required after you have submitted your final grades for the quarter; however, you must be available by email or by phone between the time of the final exam and the last day of the quarter.

Absence due to Illness or Emergency. If illness or emergency forces you to miss a class meeting, you must speak with Cindy (do not leave a voice mail message); if Cindy is unavailable, please call a UWP administrator. When possible, you should also arrange for a qualified substitute instructor. Neither a staff person nor a non-UCD employee may proctor an examination or handle any matter related to instruction. Try not to cancel class, but if you are forced to do so, please ensure that students miss none of the instruction they would normally have received. You will certainly want to add office hours.

Cancellation of classes to hold conferences. Instructors may cancel one class meeting per quarter to meet individually with each of their students.

COMMUNICATING COURSE POLICIES, REQUIREMENTS, AND ASSIGNMENTS

During the first two class meetings, students should receive written information about how to contact you and about office hours, course prerequisites and requirements, due dates for all major assignments (including midterm and final exams), percentages of all components of the course grade, and policies regarding attendance, late submission of work, revision, and plagiarism.

You may, of course, revise your syllabus during the term, and you should explicitly say so. In almost no case, however, should you revise the syllabus to add major assignments, change grading percentages, or move deadlines to an earlier point in the quarter. You may hand out the schedule of reading assignments in installments and give detailed writing assignments later, but all writing assignments should be distributed in writing at least one week before they are due. For detailed guidelines on program policies and advice for setting policies that are fair but flexible, see Guidelines for Syllabus and Course Information.

ESTABLISHING A COMFORTABLE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Students are entitled by law to a safe and comfortable learning environment, free of hostility or harassment. Federal and state laws and/or university policy prohibit discrimination and harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, or marital status. Please read and foster the UC Davis Principles of Community (http://principles.ucdavis.edu/). Also beneficial is the Student Judicial Affairs (SJA) handout Working Together To Create a Hate-Free Campus (http://sja/ucdavis.edu).

In planning course materials, consider carefully the impacts of controversial or disturbing materials, making sure that you have clear pedagogical rationales for all materials. As the MLA Statement of Professional Ethics explains, “Inasmuch as the teaching of language, writing, and literature not only involves a comprehension of the course materials but also may draw, more directly than other subjects do, on students’ intellectual and emotional experiences, faculty members, in devising requirements for written work and oral discussion, have an ethical responsibility to respect both students’ privacy and their emotional and intellectual dignity.”

Office Hours

Instructors must hold at least two office hours for one course and at least three for two or three courses. You may arrange to have some hours “by appointment,” but you must hold the minimum number of scheduled hours. You should also hold scheduled office hours on at least two separate days of the week, preferably at different hours of the day (to help accommodate students’ class schedules).

Normally instructors should hold office hours in their assigned offices and during regular business hours (8-5). However, because the doors to Voorhies are locked for the evening shortly after 5 p.m. and instructors are not permitted to prop open the doors so that students may enter the building, office hours held after 5:00 p.m. must be held outside Voorhies. After-hour office hours should be held on campus or close by, in a place where students will feel comfortable talking about their work and will not feel required to spend money. If some office hours will be held after 5:00 p.m. and/or off campus, you should include a clear statement of that fact in your syllabus or course information sheet and inform students that appointments are available in a place that respects the student's privacy rights.

Duplication of Class Materials

Instructors are responsible for their own photocopying. Graduate student instructors will use the copy machine in 178 Voorhies; faculty will use the copy machine in 378 Voorhies. Given the large number of classes and instructors, you should probably factor in at least one hour before class for photocopying purposes. The computer printers in 201 and 378 Voorhies are not to be used for making multiple copies of a document. Please note: supplies, copiers, and printers are provided for the preparation of UCD teaching materials and other UWP work; they are not to be used for personal materials, non-UCD course materials, job-search documents, or graduate student papers or research.

Each instructor receives a photocopy allowance, determined by the number of classes being taught. If you plan on copying a lot of material for your class, you can arrange with an off-campus photocopy service to provide these materials to your students for a fee. Students must provide their own multiple copies of the drafts used in class workshops; they should not be given access to instructors’ computers or printers and should not print their documents in computer classrooms during class time.

Whether you are copying your own material or having it copied at a local photocopy shop, please be aware of copyright law. For copyright information, read Copyrights and Copywrongs, which is located next to all photocopiers. Some photocopy services require copyright permissions for published materials, so allow adequate time to acquire permissions.

See Mary White (166 Voorhies) for transparencies for overhead machines. Use the copier in Mary’s office or the laser printer in room 201 or 378 to create transparencies, as the big copiers tend to jam.

If you have large copying jobs amounting to more than 200 copies, see Melissa Lovejoy (168 Voorhies) about using Reprographics. The required forms are available on the wall outside of Melissa’s office. (Melissa does not handle requests for course readers.)

Collecting and Returning Student Work

Students must submit papers directly to their instructors, not to the main office. Therefore, please tell your students that they must submit papers in class or during your office hours. If you wish, you may accept electronic submissions.

It is advisable to tell students to keep hard copies of any written work submitted for class until the end of the quarter or until they receive their course grades.

Students who submit work on time should have graded work returned within a week of its submission.

The Federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 and the California Information Practices Act prohibits faculty from posting grades, returning papers or exams in class with grades visible, allowing one student to pick up another student’s graded work (without a written authorization kept on file for at least one year after quarter’s end), or returning graded work by leaving it in a location accessible to the public. If you must return a paper outside your office, you can preserve a student’s right to privacy by using a coded identity (for example, the last six digits of a student’s ID number). Please remember, however, that papers posted outside one’s office are easily stolen or lost and that under no circumstance may boxes of papers be left in the hallways.

Final Exams

Senate Regulation 772 requires that final exams be given in undergraduate courses. Your final exam should require that students write an essay that counts for a significant part (at least 10%) of the final grade. A take-home exam may not be given in UWP 1. A take-home exam is permissible in other writing classes, but only if it requires no more than three hours of writing and is due at the time of the regularly scheduled final. If you give a take-home final exam, you should be available in your office or in the classroom at the regularly scheduled exam time to collect the exam yourself or arrange to have your students submit the exam to you electronically. Students may not submit final exams to the program staff.

Although you may offer an alternative exam time during final exam week, you cannot require students to take a final exam at any time other than the officially scheduled time announced in the Class Schedule and Registration Guide.

Grades

Explain your grading criteria clearly. Please apply grading standards consistently and fairly, do not give in to student pressure or grade inflation, and do not over-reward participation or improvement. You should raise the grade no more than a third of a step, (e.g., from a C to a C+) for participation or improvement. (If you weigh participation separately, no more than 10 to 15% of the course grade should reflect class participation; improvement can be rewarded simply by your giving more weight grades should be based on the quality of the writing.) At the end of the term, calculate your grades mathematically. The calculated grade is the lowest grade the student may receive in a class.
 
Record grades throughout the quarter. Midway through the quarter students should have received grades on at least two papers so that they know where they stand.

Instructors must submit grades electronically within 72 hours of the final exam and give the Program Coordinator (Cindy) a hard copy of the electronic grade sheet and attachments as requested on the checklist you receive at the end of the quarter. Because grades can be changed only under strictly limited conditions, please check your calculations and proofread your grades before submitting them.

Assigning a Grade of “Enrolled No Work Submitted” (NS). This grade is assigned when a student on your roster has submitted no graded work. Please do not misuse the NS (enrolled--no work submitted) designation. The Academic Senate policy for this grade is highly specific and restrictive. A student who submitted only an ungraded diagnostic essay, for example, can receive this grade; a student who submitted only the first graded paper cannot.

Assigning a Grade of Incomplete (I). The Academic Senate policy for this grade is highly specific and restrictive:

• The student’s work must be of passing quality and represent a significant portion of the requirements for a final grade.
• The circumstances preventing the student from completing the work must be significant, unpredictable, unavoidable (i.e., illness, accident, death in the family), and documented.

All instructors who are not Continuing Lecturers must obtain advance approval from the UWP Director, Associate Director for Lower Division, or Assistant Director for Upper Division before assigning an “I” grade. An instructor who assigns an “I” grade must also fill out an incomplete form (Instructor’s Report of Assignment of Grade ‘Incomplete’) available in the Faculty Secure Section of the website under Forms. More detailed information about the qualifications for an "I" grade can be found on the form.

Assigning a Y Grade: Suspected Academic Misconduct. Academic Senate policy requires all instructors to refer cases of suspected academic misconduct to Student Judicial Affairs. Academic integrity, appropriate social behavior and deportment in class, and principles of community are defined in numerous publications available on the SJA website (http://sja.ucdavis.edu/). Although students are responsible for knowing, and adhering to, university policies regarding plagiarism and other forms of student misconduct, we recommend spending class time discussing plagiarism. Doing so will help students fully understand how to use and cite sources and fulfill an instructor’s obligation to help them avoid academic misconduct. For further information about what you should include in your syllabus and for more discussion of techniques for preventing and handling plagiarism, please see Plagiarism Guidelines for University Writing Program Instructors, available on the UWP website here.

If you suspect plagiarism:
Keep a copy of the suspicious paper or exam, along with any other materials that support the suspicion.

Do not assign a grade, but invite the student to talk to you about the paper. Avoid accusing the student of any misdeed. Instead, discuss the paper with the student, asking questions about the writing process, the content, and/or the sources, in order to assess his/her familiarity with the paper. This gives the student an opportunity to acknowledge misconduct and provides information useful to SJA in investigating the case and determining sanctions.

If you are not a Continuing Lecturer, consult with the appropriate administrator—the Associate Director for Lower Division, the Assistant Director for Upper Division, or the Director—before referring a case to Student Judicial Affairs (SJA). You must also provide a copy of each memo referring a case to SJA to the appropriate assistant director. If a case has not been adjudicated before quarter’s end, an instructor assigns a grade of Y; that grade will remain until SJA has resolved the case.

Student Judicial Affairs has the sole responsibility for adjudicating cases and determining penalties within guidelines consistent with UWP policies. If SJA determines that the paper has been plagiarized, the paper will receive a grade of “F” (a “0” on a standard 4-point or 11-point scale, or a 50 on a 100-point scale). SJA will consult with the instructor throughout the investigation, discussing what sanctions to apply.

By campus-wide policy, a student found guilty of academic misconduct on an assignment does not automatically fail the course. Even when SJA determines that a paper was entirely or almost entirely plagiarized, so that the student did not meet the course’s word requirement, the student must be given one opportunity to rewrite the paper satisfactorily or, at the instructor’s discretion, write a new paper, in order to complete the minimum word requirement. If the student is required to rewrite the paper to meet the minimum word requirement, it will receive the grade it merits and may, at the instructor’s discretion, be averaged with the “F” grade.  The penalty applies only to the plagiarized work.

Accommodating Students with Disabilities

Students with documented disabilities may be entitled to accommodations on quizzes, in-class writing, and exams. The student must provide a letter from the Student Disability Center, which will specify the accommodations recommended for each individual. Frequently this will require using a different room, as it may require additional time, use of a computer, or other specific conditions.

During the final exam period two rooms (one in Voorhies, one elsewhere on campus) are reserved for this purpose. During the quarter, contact Mary White to arrange a room in Voorhies for this purpose.