PSYC 103 Research Requirement: Penalties for Missing Appointments
Experimenters have usually invested a great deal of time and effort in preparing the study, and much of it is wasted if you fail to keep your appointment. By signing up for an experiment, you are committing yourself to participate in the study and should make every effort to keep your appointment. Also, by signing up and occupying a time slot, you may prevent other interested persons from participating in the research. Of course, sometimes because of illness or other unavoidable circumstances, you may not be able to keep your appointment. In such cases, you should cancel your appointment. Described below are the penalties for failing to show up without attempting to cancel your appointment.
The Psychology department has approved a procedure for all PSYC 103 instructors to follow in order to properly enforce the research experience requirement.
1. The research requirement (designated as 6 experiment credits) must be satisfied in an all or none fashion prior to the last day of scheduled classes for that semester. One may not receive partial credit or points toward their grade for participating in less than the required amount of research (e.g., one 30-minute study). Therefore, because the research experience is worth 5 percent of the final grade, a student may not earn 2.5 percent of their final grade by participating in half the amount of the required research. That student would instead receive a zero for not satisfying the requirement.
2. Students must earn 2 experimental credits prior to midterm. The course instructor reserves the right to penalize students (i.e., deduct a portion of the five percent of their final grade) if they do not earn 2 credits prior to midterm. This penalty (typically 2 percent) will still come into effect even if students eventually complete all 6 credits.
3. Participants may use the experiment web site (http://www.experimetrix.com/cofc) to cancel an appointment up to two hours prior to the experiment. Students who cancel their appointments within this time frame will not incur any penalty.
4. Students who fail to show up for an experiment for which they are scheduled must then complete 1 additional credit (approximately a half-hour) of research participation. Thus, a total of 7 credits are required. Students may do so by participating in additional experiments, completing the journal review alternative, or by doing some combination of both.
5. Students who fail to show up for a second experiment for which they are scheduled must then complete 1 additional credit of research participation. Thus, students who failed to show up for a second scheduled appointment without canceling it must complete a total of 8 credits for their research requirement. In these instances, students will no longer be allowed to sign-up for additional studies and therefore must satisfy any remaining portion of the requirement by completing the journal review alternative.
6. Most experiments end just prior to the last week of class. There is no guarantee that experiments are available to accommodate research participation extremely late in the semester (e.g., the last week of classes or final exam week). Students who procrastinate in signing up for experiments run the risk of having to satisfy the requirement by completing the journal review alternative. When students fail to participant in experiments for this reason and fail to satisfy the requirement through alternative means (i.e., journal review option), they will receive a zero.
Last updated: 04.Aug.2006