Geneseo INTD 105 09 Syllabus

Instructor: Doug Baldwin
Office: South 307
Phone: 245-5659
Email: baldwin@geneseo.edu
Office Hours: Any time Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, when I’m not committed to something else. See my Calendar for details and to make appointments electronically. You don’t need to make appointments to see me, but may if you want to be sure I’ll be available.

Writing is, obviously, an important form of communication. As a form of communication, good writing requires clarity, sensitivity to one’s audience, and awareness of style rules appropriate to the nature of the communication. More importantly, however, good writing (or good communication in any form) requires having something to communicate in the first place. A firm grasp on the issues at hand, and an ability to form a coherent, logical argument are therefore essential to persuasive writing. This course mainly develops these latter skills, for example, skills of identifying issues, forming opinions, gathering evidence in support of opinions, and compiling the results into a compelling academic text. However, in the process of developing these skills this course also reinforces your ability to write in clear Standard English.

Issues, opinions, arguments, and writings without a subject are pointless at best. This course therefore uses secret codes as an entry point to discussion and writing. Much of this discussion and writing will actually deal with issues surrounding the codes in our readings rather than with the codes themselves, although we will also spend time during the semester looking at some of the history, mathematics, and technology of cryptography.

Corequisite(s): INTD 106

Learning Outcomes: On completing this course, students who meet expectations will be able to…

Form individual opinions on issues arising from readings
Defend those opinions in principled arguments that draw on objective evidence where available
Clearly express those arguments in writing
Use a writing process that includes planning, drafting, feedback, reflection, and revision
Use library and electronic resources to gather credible evidence to support arguments
Define honest and dishonest use of other people’s creative work, and identify common forms of plagiarism

Books and Other Resources

Books

We will read the following works in this course. Some are available online, and others in print. I have given URLs for the online readings below. The print ones are available from the College bookstore and other sources.

Supplemental Materials

You may also find these supplemental readings helpful, and I will probably assign at least parts of them:

A technical description of the German Enigma cipher and techniques used to break it

Other Resources

The INTD 106 modules can serve as a writing manual for this course. They are available in Canvas at

Course Schedule

The following dates are best estimates. They may well change as students’ actual needs become apparent. Refer to the Web version of this syllabus for the most current information, I will keep it as up-to-date as possible:

Grades and Such

Your grade for this course will be calculated from your grades on exercises, exams, etc. as follows:

In determining numeric grades for individual assignments, questions, etc., I start with the idea that meeting my expectations for a solution is worth 80% of the grade. I award the other 20% for exceeding my expectations in various ways (e.g., having an unusually elegant or insightful solution, or expressing it particularly clearly, or doing unrequested out-of-class research to develop it, etc.); I usually award 10 percentage points for almost anything that somehow exceeds expectations, and the last 10 for having a solution that is truly perfect. I deliberately make the last 10 percentage points extremely hard to get, on the grounds that in any course there will be some students who routinely earn 90% on everything, and I want even them to have something to strive for. I grade work that falls below my expectations as either meeting about half of them, three quarters, one quarter, or none, and assign numeric grades accordingly: 60% for work that meets three quarters of my expectations, 40% for work that meets half of my expectations, etc. This relatively coarse grading scheme is fairer, more consistent, and easier to implement than one that tries to make finer distinctions.

This grading scheme produces numeric grades noticeably lower than traditional grading does. I take this into account when I convert numeric grades to letter grades. The general guideline I use for letter grades is that meeting my expectations throughout a course earns a B or B+. Noticeably exceeding my expectations earns some sort of A (i.e., A- or A), meeting most but clearly not all some sort of C, trying but failing to meet most expectations some sort of D, and apparently not even trying earns an E. I set the exact numeric cut-offs for letter grades at the end of the course, when I have an overall sense of how realistic my expectations were for a class as a whole. This syllabus thus cannot tell you exactly what percentage grade will count as an A, a B, etc. However, in my past courses the B+ to A- cutoff has typically fallen somewhere in the mid to upper 80s, the C+ to B- cutoff somewhere around 60, and the D to C- cutoff in the mid-40s to mid-50s. I will be delighted to talk with you at any time during the semester about your individual grades and give you my estimate of how they will eventually translate into a letter grade.

Essays

I will ask you to write five essays for this course, four “persuasive” and one “reflective.” The persuasive essays are where you will practice writing a convincing argument for some position, while the reflective essay asks you to describe your thoughts about your own learning. I will hand out long descriptions of each essay as we come to it, but here is a brief list of what you can expect. The first four essays are the persuasive ones, the last the reflective one. See the course schedule for due dates.

The Writing Learning Center

The Writing Learning Center (WLC) provides confidential peer consultations on all stages of the writing process for all kinds of writing assignment. Consultations last half an hour, and are available by appointment throughout most afternoons and evenings. The WLC is an invaluable resource for this course, and I encourage you to visit them during the course and after. They are located in Milne Library room 221. See their web site at https://www.geneseo.edu/english/writing_center for more information or to schedule an appointment.

Policy on Late and Missed Work

I will accept exercise solutions that are turned in late, but with a 10% per day compound late penalty. For example, homework turned in 1 day late gets 10% taken off its grade; homework turned in 2 days late gets 10% taken off for the first day, then 10% of what’s left gets taken off for the second day. Similarly for 3 days, 4 days, and so forth. I round grades to the nearest whole number, so it is possible for something to be so late that its grade rounds to 0.

I may allow make-up exams or extensions on exercises if (1) the make-up or extension is necessitated by circumstances truly beyond your control, and (2) you ask for it as early as possible. At my discretion, I may require proof of the “circumstances beyond your control” before granting a make-up exam or extension.

Policy on Collaboration

Writing assignments in this course are learning exercises, not tests of what you know. You are therefore welcome (and in some cases even required) to discuss them with each other. However, the draft and finished works that you turn in must represent your own ideas and must be written in your own words, even if you got or gave help on them.

If you use sources other than this class’s texts in an essay, you must cite them. All quotations or paraphrases must be cited, regardless of the source. I don’t insist on a specific citation style, but if you are don’t have a preference of your own APA style is a good choice.

Please note that tests are tests of what you know, and working together on them is explicitly forbidden.

I will penalize violations of this policy. The severity of the penalty will depend on the severity of the violation.

Accommodations

SUNY Geneseo will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented physical, emotional, or cognitive disabilities. Accommodations will be made for medical conditions related to pregnancy or parenting. Students should contact Dean Buggie-Hunt in the Office of Disability Services (tbuggieh@geneseo.edu or 585-245-5112) and their faculty to discuss needed accommodations as early as possible in the semester.

Aug. 28	Introduction
Aug. 28 - Sep. 4	Overview of the Writing Process
Sep. 4	Draft Warm-Up Essay Due
Sep. 11	Final Warm-Up Essay Due
Sep. 4 - Sep. 20	“The Gold Bug” and Race
Sep. 20	Draft Gold Bug Essay Due
Sep. 27	Final Gold Bug Essay Due
Sep. 20 - Oct. 2	Substitution Ciphers
Oct. 4	Midterm
Oct. 4 - Oct. 30	Enigma and Library Research
Oct. 23	Draft Enigma Essay Due
Nov. 2	Final Enigma Essay Due
Oct. 30 - Nov. 1	The Enigma Cipher
Nov. 1 - Nov. 29	Breaking the Code and Alan Turing
Nov. 27	Draft Breaking the Code Essay Due
Dec. 7	Final Breaking the Code Essay Due
Nov. 29 - Dec. 6	Miscellaneous Topics in Cryptography
Dec. 17	Reflective Essay Due
Dec. 17	Final exam

Persuasive Essays (4)	50%
Reflective Essay	10%
Midterm	10%
Final	20%
Class Participation	10%