Geography 127 contains both a lecture and a lab component. Each lab section meets once a week for two hours and is taught by one of the course’s two teaching assistants. In lab, you will perform a variety of exercises designed to explore some of the course’s main themes in more detail. Because these exercises are tied to the course’s lecture material they offer you additional opportunities to review for lecture exams and to ask more detailed questions about related topics in physical geography. We hope you will find these lab exercises interesting as well as informative.

Grading:  Lab is a required part of Geography 127. You must pass lab to pass the course, and we expect high quality lab work and active participation from all students. Although there is no separate final grade for lab, your performance in lab constitutes 1/3 of your total course grade for Geography 127, meaning 100 of the course’s 300 available points. These 100 lab points are parceled out as follows:

• Lab Quizzes (3): 30points
• First Paper: 10 points
• Final Paper 50: points
• Lab Participation: 10 points
• Total: 100 points

Please Note:  No matter how well you may perform on lecture exams, you cannot pass Geography 127 without earning 51% of the total lab points. That means you must score at least 51 out of the available 100 lab points to be eligible to pass the course. There will be an opportunity to earn 10 extra credit points by attending one of the scheduled Saturday morning restoration projects.

Attendance:  Weekly attendance in lab is required in order to pass Geography 127. Should extenuating circumstances cause you to need to miss lab, you must contact your TA ahead of time so that you can arrange to make up the material in a different lab section that same week.

Please Note: Your first unexcused absence from lab will lower your final course grade by 15 points—a point deduction likely to drop your final grade by a letter. If you miss a second lab you will lose an additional 20 points. If you have three or more unexcused absences from lab you will automatically fail Geography 127.

• One unexcused absence -15 pts
• Two unexcused absences -20 pts
• Total -35 pts
• Three unexcused absences Fail 127

Field Trips:  Over the course of the semester we will take three required field trips to a small university-owned park called Picnic Point. For these weeks, your lab section will meet out at Picnic Point (and not in the lab room) at your regularly scheduled time. Your lab will meet rain or shine. Students routinely rate these trips as one of the best parts of the course, largely because they get us all outside.

Office Hours: The TAs in Geography 127 are all hardworking graduate students who will devote a great deal of their time to making your lab experience a positive one. It’s worth getting to know your TA and it’s worth taking advantage of the help they offer by visiting them during office hours. If you can’t make it to their regularly scheduled office hours, you can always set up a different meeting time.