When you are asked to complete an assignment, the point is not to keep you busy and not to "give" you a grade. The point is to help you learn. Sometimes we try to get you to review material, to connect ideas, to explore consequences, or to exercise thinking and writing skills that are essential for a scientific career. Only together can we achieve these goals.

For example, a paper is designed to help you focus some reading and thought on a problem of your choosing and to exercise your communication skills. If you try to complete this paper at the last minute, you'll neither learn much about the topic nor improve your communication skills. You must work throughout the semester on your paper to achieve the associated educational goals.

The way grades are assigned depends on how well you meet the goals of the exercise. Thus the measures used to assign grades reflect the goals and are useful as you work on the assignments. I created this page to tell you what I expect from graduate students. I hope you will use these metrics to guide you as you complete assignments and projects that satisfy you as well as me. These rubrics are not absolutes but you should use them as a guide. If you need clarification on an item, ask me.

Below are "grading rubrics" that you can use as a guideline for preparing your project or paper. More points are better, and you might consider the numbers 4,3,2,1 as equivalents to A,B,C,D. The scoring is not quite so straight forward - content may be weighted more than some of the other items, but polished prose and clear, well selected illustrations are critical to producing a useful paper. If you can't communicate your content, you can't have content.

Note that the paper is a term paper. The entire point of the assignment is to allow you to explore a topic independently and more thoroughly than we can in class. This takes time. I review your papers as the result of 12-15 weeks of effort. If you spend a few days during the last week of the semester on it, don't expect a passing grade. Few would produce an acceptable paper in that time.

Plagiarism is the copying of text or ideas from others without the appropriate citation. This will get you a quick F on the paper. I don't think any of you intend to steal someone's ideas, but you must carefully avoid subtle forms of plagiarism. Never copy passages from another document with only a few "mechanical" changes to the wording - plagiarism is not limited to copying something exactly as stated. Paraphrase the ideas and always give credit to the work from which they came. A good way to avoid plagiarism is to synthesize ideas from many sources - this forces you to express your synthesis in your words.

This is roughly the way a grade is assigned to a "literature review" paper:

	1	2	3	4
Content	Based on a few sources such as text books or introductory material	Contains information from most recent work on topic	Literature summary is thorough and well organized.	The important results of the cited works is synthesized into original ideas or viewpoints
Organization	Difficult to follow	Partially organized but some sections are difficult to follow	Presented with a logical sequence of ideas and concepts	Logical and interesting organization of ideas
Mechanics	Contains more than a few errors	Fewer than 3 spelling and less than 3 grammatical errors	Competent grammar	Well written
Illustrations	Contains properly cited illustrations	The number of illustrations is appropriate - only important illustrations are used	Contains original illustrations to help reader understand the main ideas	Information from different works is synthesized in original (or modified) graphics to help compare ideas and results
Timeliness	More than 3 days late	Up to 3 days late	Up to 1 day late	Submitted on time

Here is a rubric summarizing the way a grade is assigned to a MATLAB or programming project:

	1	2	3	4
Content	The computation is at the advanced level (check with me to help define "advanced")	The theoretical background of the computation is clearly described	The project is complete and useful for a realistic seismology research analysis	The tool you develop is used to creatively explore the theoretical basis of the computation or explore the performance and/or utility of the approach using actual seismograms
Organization	Difficult to follow	Partially organized but some sections are difficult to follow	Presented with a logical sequence of ideas and concepts	Logical and interesting organization of ideas
Mechanics	Contains more than a few errors	Fewer than 3 spelling and less than 3 grammatical errors	Competent grammar	Well written
Illustrations	Contains properly cited illustrations	The number of illustrations is appropriate - only important illustrations are used	Contains original illustrations to help reader understand the main ideas	Information from different works is synthesized in original (or modified) graphics to help compare ideas and results
Timeliness	More than 3 days late	Up to 3 days late	Up to 1 day late	Submitted on time