In this course, we are striving to appreciate the inter-relatedness of different branches of science. To accomplish this, we ask that you, the student, make a conscious effort to clarify the connections between units of study. It seems inappropriate in such an endeavor to give a grade based on adding up scores on a collection of independent pieces.

We are never really through with a unit. As we study the physical properties of light, or the harnessing of the energy in light by plants, etc., we will not leave behind the principles we learned early on about color mixing and color perception. The ideas presented early on persist as part of our understanding of the ideas we come to later on in the semester.

Your grade in this course will depend on your demonstration of overall understanding of the phenomena we explore. Since the later topics depend on the earlier ones, doing well on a later paper will most likely demonstrate understanding of an earlier topic. In the end, your grade is not lowered, for example, by an early paper on color mixing that contained glaring omissions (and hence got a low score), if later papers (on color vision, for example), show that you have mastered the color mixing rules.

There are two additional ways you can demonstrate understanding: writing addenda to origial papers whose scores were unsatisfactory to you; and writing the comprehensive final paper which puts together all the material into a cohesive whole, making the connections between parts explicit.

At the end of the semester, you will submit this final paper, for which you will get instructions later on in the semester, and a portfolio containing all your written work for the semester (and anything else your discussion instructor specifies). Include in that portfolio your responses to your instructor's comments on any paper you wish. (For example, if a comment on your Opticks lab report said, "It's not clear to me why you think red light is homogeneal," your addendum could be a paragraph clarifying your original statement about read light.) Your instructor will have all these materials in front of him as he assigns a final grade, rather than a series of disconnected numeric scores in his grade book.

It is never too late (at least until the last day of finals) to show us that you understand the ideas and make the connections between them.