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Andrew J Howard, instructor;
howard@iit.edu,
312-567-5881, cell phone 773-368-5067; Fax : 312-567-3576
Office Hours: Life Sciences Room 174, Monday 10am - 12:30pm,
and Wednesday 10am - 11:05am and 4:30 - 6:00, or by appointment.
This schedule may change as the spring progresses;
check this space for possible modifications.
Grading plans:
The percentage of your grade contributed by various sources will be as follows.
| Item | Date | Weight |
| Midterm | 15 September | 15% |
| Midterm | 13 October | 15% |
| Midterm | 10 November | 15% |
| Final | TBA * | 24% |
| Homework | roughly weekly | 13% |
| iClicker Quizzes | roughly weekly | 6% |
| Peer-reviewed Literature Assignments | Weekly | 6% |
| Class Participation | passim. | 6% |
Electronic communication:
I expect to be able to reach you by electronic mail and through Blackboard throughout the semester. You should use your official IIT e-mail address. If you choose to use another address for most of your e-mail, you have two choices: either check your IIT address in addition to your non-IIT address, or arrange to forward your IIT mail to your non-IIT mail system. Instructions for doing so are available on the IIT website.
Class participation:
The class participation grade will be determined based on your participation in several activities:
Midterms:
The dates for the midterms are listed above. Note that all of them fall on the short (Monday) class sessions. Each will include definitions, short-answer questions, and more substantial questions that require one to three paragraphs each to answer. The full 75 minutes will be available for for the exam. You will not be permitted to use your textbook or class notes, but for each midterm I will supply a help-sheet to help you remember factual information like the gas constant and the relationship among free energy, entropy, and enthalpy. I will also provide some relevant mathematical constants, like e, ln(2), log102, and ln(10), and physical constants like c, h, and the gas constant. There are, in fact, help-sheets already posted for the first two midterms and for the final exam; the ultimate versions of these help-sheets will be posted shortly before the exam itself. You will be handed a copy of the help-sheet at the exam, so don't bring your personal copy with you. When you're finished with each exam, take your help-sheet with you to help you study for the next exam.
Final Examination:
The final will be given at the University's mandated date and time, which has not been set: watch this space for this result. There will be a help-sheet for the final as for the midterms. The final will be closed-book and closed-notes. The final will be comprehensive, i.e. it will cover all the material in the course; but it will be especially geared toward the material from the final seven lectures, since we will not have had a midterm on that material.
Homework:
Submit your homework assignments through the "assignments" section of the Blackboard system itself. Do not use the Digital Dropbox, email, or paper submissions. These assignments will be due at 1700 CDT on the date stated on Blackboard. I will accept late homework assignments, but your grade will be lowered relative to the score you'd get if you turn it in on time. Once I have posted the answer key for a homework assignment, you will not be able to submit your contribution. I encourage you to do the homework assignments for three reasons:
Your answers to most non-calculational homework questions should require about a paragraph. For study purposes, I'd encourage you to try the problems in the textbook for which the answers are found in the back, and the problems given in the textbook website. If you've gotten them right, you probably understand the material.
Students sometimes want to resubmit assignments, either because they realize that their original submission contained errors or because they have submitted an assignment into the wrong slot. Blackboard doesn't permit you to resubmit on your own, so if you want to resubmit an assignment, simply email me and I will delete your original submission so you can submit your revised version.
Literature Assignments:
Students in biology 403 will need to turn in a brief report roughly once per week summarizing a paper from the peer-reviewed literature. The specifics of these assignments are outlined on the Assignments page on Blackboard. It is your responsibility to find the assigned journal articles, but many of them will be posted in PDF form on the Blackboard site under "Course Documents" → "Journal Articles". There may be others available electronically from Galvin Library, and others may be available from Crerar, UIC, or Argonne. If you want help finding an article, request help from a reference librarian at Galvin: that's why they're there. Getting an obscure article from an external source can take a day or two in some cases, so plan ahead.
Schedule:
This is the plan for what topics we'll cover. This information is provided in greater detail in the course schedule. Note that some of the chapters, or sections of chapters, in Horton et al are not on the list at all; that's deliberate. This is a 900-page book, and there's no way to move through the entire book in one semester without oversimplifying things to the point of incoherence. So we'll pick and choose. The schedule listed below is pretty agressive; we may fall slightly behind and have to truncate the schedule a bit, but we'll let you know that in advance.
| Topics | Lectures | Dates | Chapters in Text | Exam |
| Methods, building blocks, enzymes | Lectures 1-5 | 23 Aug- 8 Sep | 1-5.6, 10.5-10.7 | 15 Sep |
| Enzymes, Cofactors, Metabolites | Lectures 6-12 | 13 Sep-6 Oct | 5.7-9 | 13 Oct |
| Energetics, Metabolism I | Lectures 13-18 | 18 Oct- 3 Nov | 10-16 | 10 Nov |
| Metabolism II, Molecular Biology | Lectures 19-25 | 8 Nov- 1 Dec | 17-22 | TBA |
Taking the Exams:
Those of you taking the exams at IIT should be aware that we will go to substantial lengths to minimize the likelihood of cheating. Any student who is found to be cheating will be given a summary zero on the exam on which he or she is found to be cheating; a second infraction will result in an automatic E for the course. The teaching assistants will be present to proctor the exams, and will keep an eye out for low-tech and high-tech forms of cheating. No hats or other headgear, apart from those required by your religious practices, will be allowed at exams. You will not be allowed to bring any electronic devices, notes, or books to the exams; the calculational problems will be numerically straightforward, so that you can do them with a pencil and paper. I reserve the right to impound calculators, cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs, laptops, and other electronic devices brought into exams. Any numbers that you might ordinarily have to obtain from a calculator will be provided on the help-sheet. I reserve the right to provide some mathematical and physical constants that you will not need; don't assume that if a constant is on the help-sheet, you're going to have a use for it. If you haven't done long division in six years, you might want to practice a bit before the first midterm. My exams tend to be reasonably easy, but long, so planning and prioritization are important.
I am often asked whether I grade on a curve. The answer is yes, but I curve your performance relative to ten years of students who have studied this material before you, rather than just relative to your current cohort. In general I tend to assign the top 25% of the class as A's, the next 40% as B's, the next 20% as C's, and the final 15% as D's and E's; but if your performance as a group is poorer than the average over previous years, the percentages in the A and B ranges will go down, and if you're doing better than previous years, the percentages in the A and B ranges will go up. I never assign letter grades to individual assignments or exams, although I may provide rough estimates of the A/B and B/C cutoffs for individual midterms; so don't ask for exact cutoffs, since they don't exist.