PLEASE NOTE: Canvas has a built-in function that tries to calculate your grade based on your current performance. Disregard ANY and ALL calculations or totals that this algorithm throws at you. We are NOT using it and it is not setup to calculate accurate grades or totals. It is severely limited and cumbersome to setup behind the scenes. Until it improves I won’t be using it.
Disregard any and all Canvas designations about whether an assignment is counted towards your final grade. ALL assignments, exams, and constituents listed here count towards your final grade!
Grading: Your final grade will be based on a syllabus quiz (2%), three hour exams (26% each), attendance (5%), and three assignments (5% each, 15%).
Scores will be posted on Canvas gradebook. Students should regularly check their grades online. If you are missing a grade on Canvas gradebook, or have found an error, contact your teaching assistant via e-mail right away. You have 7 days to correct gradebook errors from the time that grades are first posted on Canvas. After that we are unable to change scores – absolutely no exceptions.
Syllabus Quiz: You will read carefully through THIS ENTIRE online course website and then take the associated “syllabus quiz” on Canvas. You have an unlimited number of trials to get all the answers correct. This serves to familiarize yourself with the structure of the course. Please note DUE DATE on this quiz is Sunday, January 25th, 2026 at midnight (11:59:59pm).
Exams: Exams will consist of multiple choice, and true and false questions. All three exams are administered during the usual class period (see lecture schedule). Exams cover materials covered since the previous exams. There will NOT be a cumulative final exam during final exam week so, DO NOT be misled by information given on Duke Hub, etc. regarding final exam times. Disregard that information. If you are excused from an exam, you have 5 days to make-up said exam (this count includes weekend days). ALL make-up exams MUST be scheduled through the Testing Center. Athletes may NOT have their exam make-ups proctored on the road or by third parties (advisers, coaches, etc) – all athletes must make up their exams at the Testing Center. See Missing Exams tab for more important information.
Attendance: 5% of your final grade is based on class attendance. Attendance is mandatory in ECS 103. My lecture slides are, by pedagogical design, limited to mostly images, graphics, animations, and videos. When I was a university student, I HATED lecturing-styles where professors just “read off their slides”, bombarded students with boring bullet points (often annoyingly “animated” using PowerPoint Entrance Animation options), and lazily excused their “slideuments“. You deserve better. I believe my approach makes lectures more interesting, effective, visually appealing, and more enjoyable for all (myself included). However, if you miss a lecture, you will be hard-pressed to reconstruct the relevant information from my slides, because of the lack of text.
Attendance will be taken, beginning on January 26th, 2026. You will be assigned a seat (it will feature your name tag), a process you will learn to navigate during our first few class times. You MUST sit in this seat, even if you are late to class. Attendance will be taken by the teaching assistant around 30 minutes into the class, in EVERY class period (excluding exam days). You are allowed to miss TWO lecture periods without excuse. This means that you are expected to attend a minimum of 17 (out of 19) class periods (beginning count on January 26th). After that, we will take off percentage points for missed days (0.294%/day). For how to be officially excused from a lecture, please see the Missing Class tab.
Assignments: For the assignments, you will watch four award-winning documentaries on climate change and answer questions about each of them on a Canvas quiz. You can take the associated quizzes as many times as you like before the deadline. In the end, the top three quiz scores will count towards your assignment grade (i.e.: essentially you get to drop one assignment, or, if you chose, you can only do three quizzes). Late homeworks will not be accepted, but you will have the opportunity to make-up ONE homework assignment at the end of the semester (April 13th-17th). For details and due dates see the Assignments tab.
Final Grade Cutoffs +/-: Final grade cutoffs will follow this distribution (your final percentage will be rounded to the nearest integer):
A+ 98, 99, 100
A 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97
A- 90, 91
B+ 88, 89
B 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87
B- 80, 81
C+ 78, 79
C 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77
C- 70, 71
D+ 68, 69
D 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67
D- 60, 61
F <60
THERE WILL BE ABSOLUTELY NO EXTRA CREDIT IN THIS CLASS
(Extra credit is an odd US idiosyncrasy that solicits embarrassed smirks among our international colleagues). There is no such thing as extra credit in the real-world work-environment.
