Frequently Asked Questions

No, other than your own notes. Your challenge in this course is to learn the material and understand it, not to memorize pre-digested answers to coached questions.

The lecture notes online are copies of the Powerpoint slides I show in class. Most of the time these are short, outline-style summaries of my major talking points for that day, plus important charts, graphs, pictures, etc. The online lecture notes are built around the assumption that I'm either talking to you while I'm showing them, or you've got your own in-class notes with which to follow along or refer back to the Powerpoint slides. A lot of the information you'll get in this class will come from my lectures, so if you miss those you're probably not going to be able to keep up. For most people, the best you could hope for would be a "C" if you relied solely on the Powerpoint presentations.

Also, there are in-class quizzes that you'll miss if you don't come to class. Missing those will hurt your grade.

You've paid good money (or your parents have) to take this course, so you shouldn't get cheated. Come to class, pay attention and take good notes, read the readings, and you should do pretty well in this class.

The questions on my exams will be some mixture of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short answer. My exams for this course won't contain any long answer or essay questions. There are usually a few extra credit questions on the exams, which I tend to pull from some of the more detailed lecture material, or from outside assigned readings, podcasts, or DVDs shown in class.

No, they're really really easy. A child could do them. Well what do you expect me to say here? Of course the exams are supposed to be challenging, but I don't write them with the intention of tricking you or trying to defeat you. My goal in this course is to try to teach you things, so I write my tests to question your knowledge about the subjects. A well-prepared person who takes good notes, shows up for class, and studies the assigned materials will usually do really well on my exams. If you don't study, don't show up for class, you probably won't do very well.

Yes. Or to be more precise, if you don't show up on the day of the final exam, your grade for this course will be calculated using only your in-class exam and quiz scores (plus your scores from the paper assignments), just as if there was no final exam. You don't take a zero for the final exam, it just isn't factored into the grade calculation at all. So, effectively, the final exam is optional.

I do this for two reasons. First, the final is mainly a rehash of material you've already seen on previous exams, so if you've already learned a particular subject I don't see much point in testing you on that subject again. In other words, if you sweep the three in-class exams, this is your reward: no final exam.

Secondly, making the final exam optional makes it a kind of second chance for people who didn't do as well as they'd like on previous tests. If you did poorly on the exams, but went back and re-studied the material until you've mastered it, you get to try again on the final to improve your score for the course.

Yes, it's possible to lower your grade by doing abysmally on the final exam, usually. I say usually because that's not always true. Sometimes, mainly for people who have three numerically similar exam scores (like, say, a 75%, a 78% and an 80%), it might take a final exam score of >100 or <0 to move their overall course score into another grade interval. For those people, there's no point in taking the final exam. For everyone else, doing well on the final can mean an improved letter grade.

Most people will tend to do about as well per subject on their original in-class exam and on the final exam, if they don't spend any extra time reviewing their tests and trying to learn the material they missed the first time. In these cases your final exam score will tend to reflect your original miss rate on the earlier exams, so your final exam score will be similar to the average of your three in-class exams. If that happens you won't drag your grade up or down. So it pays to use your in-class exams as study guides.

Sometimes, it's mathematically possible for someone to lower their grade by doing badly on the final. BUT... they usually have to do VERY badly on the final for that to happen. As in, they'd have to score much lower than random chance (for multiple choice tests... which the final exam will be in this class). It's very very difficult to do that. In my experience using this grading system for the last 10 years, I've never had ANYONE lower their grade this way.

But yes, in theory it IS possible.

Look, my job is to try and teach you this stuff, and I can't do that if you're not in class. Or at least I can't do it very easily. I give quizzes to keep people coming to class. Straight up. No other reason. I don't like having to do this, because I don't like treating adults like children, but outside of actually taking attendance I don't really have a lot of ideas on how to keep people from skipping class. Yes, you paid for this course, so it's your business whether you show up or not. But believe me, after doing this kind of thing for a decade I can tell you that if I just say that, a larger fraction of people will skip. The reality is that some people need a little coaching, and these quizzes are a way of trying to coax people into not skipping. If you've got a better idea I'd love to hear about it. Seriously.

Sure, ask me a question whenever you want to. I wish more people would ask questions, because usually when someone has a question they don't ask it because they think it's a stupid question or something. But most of the time several other people have the same question, and if one person asks then everyone gets to hear the answer and that might help them learn.

Listen, I'm not going to try and make anyone feel stupid for asking a question. People pay me to teach you this stuff, so students asking me questions is sort of why I'm there. And why should you feel stupid for asking me something, when supposedly the whole point of you paying money to be in class is that you're not already an expert in this subject?

If your future career will have nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, biology or geology you probably won't get a raise because you've had this course. It probably won't get you a job in the first place. But you point of this course is not to prepare you for a job. The point of this course is to teach you about where you - you as a primate, as an animal on Earth - came from and how you came to be the way you are. Most people are at least slightly interested in their own origins, and this class will hopefully give you some new information about that.

In the US, public understanding of evolution and geologic time is shamefully scant. A majority of Americans still cling to primitive superstitious beliefs about how the Earth formed, how life got started, and how humans came to be the way they are today. Because most Americans don't understand this very important and very central part of scientific knowledge, sometimes they can be easily swayed by con men, hucksters, or dishonest politicians into making choices against their own - and their children's - best interests. The state school board in Kansas voted in 1999 to remove the teaching of evolution from their state's science curriculum. As a result, Kansas became the butt of ridicule and derision across the country and around the world. How many investment, college tuition, and new employment dollars has Kansas lost because voters were convinced to elect school board members who were not only ignorant, but outright hostile, to modern science education standards? A similar measure by the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania was stopped in 2006 only after a costly legal battle in Federal court and the eventual ouster of all eight school board members who opposed teaching evolution.

This course teaches an informed layman's level of understanding about the mechanisms of biological evolution, the modern state of knowledge about how life emerged on Earth, and how the course of evolutionary change has developed over the last 4 billion years of our planet's history. This course also teaches the basics of skeptical thinking and critical reasoning, which are useful skills for anyone in any walk of life.