Assignment of Credit

Your homework assignments will be the bulk of the work for this class and should help you to learn a lot of important concepts in physics and biology and teach you about current research in biophysics. It is very important for you to understand this in its entirety in order to get the most out of this course.

Your team homework should be uploaded to this website by going to the sidebar and selecting Create Content->Private Student Homework. Do not email the instructor assignments or hand in printed copies. Only one copy of an assignment per team, unless otherwise stated, should be uploaded. Do not upload multiple copies or ones with small changes. Do not upload a single problem and then another one later.

Before uploading, check with all of your team members that they are happy with the work that is being submitted. Your team members should all scrutinize each other's work and check it for mistakes in areas where they have some experience.

In general, you will work in teams of three students to collaborate on problems that require expertise in multiple areas. In any collaboration, it is essential to acknowledge credit where credit is due. With each problem that you hand in, you must specifically state what the contribution is of all the members, for each part of the problem. This is in keeping with standard scientific practice and is followed by the best journals such as Nature. You and your team will not receive credit for your efforts unless this practice is followed. Proper credit and distribution of effort must be acknowledged in detail.

This should be done on the first page. The name of the team members and the homework assignment should always be stated. For assignments with multiple problems, each your homework should state what the contribution was for each problem, for example:

Problem 1: John Smith, Amy Jones, both implemented code and ran simulations required for parts 1, 2, and 3. Deborah Johnson answered all of the parts containing biological questions, that is 6, 7, and 8. Amy Jones worked out the analytical formulas required for parts 4 and 5.

Team Etiquette

In order to collaborate effectively with each other you should do the following:

Communication between members is crucial for getting a collaboration to work.

When you email you should always cc everyone on your team so that they're all kept in the loop. Even if what you're discussing is trivial or hard for the other members to understand, you should still do this.

Assign a single person in your team to be in charge of the final write-up. Before you turn in an assignment, go through all of it carefully with all your team members and give them a chance to comment and give their approval.

It is bad form to submit multiple versions of an assignment, or different problems coming from different team members. This shows that communication is not working between team members. Even if some members do not work on a particular problem, they should read through what has been said, and make suggestions and comments. This is also crucial when publishing papers.

Sometimes situations arise when a team member can't do their part, so the rest of the team can try to make do without them. However sometimes this is very hard to do. If you can't work on a project, you should immediately let your team members know this, so that they can figure out some plan B. Then you and the team can let the instructor know the situation so this doesn't negatively affect all the members of the team.

If communication in the team has broken down, it's expected that you alert the instructor to try to patch up the situation. The teams can be rearranged if necessary so that all the students are getting the most out of the course.

This course is suppose to introduce you to research. If you get stuck, first consult with other team members to see if they have some ideas. You very likely will need to work together, especially for more challenging problems. If your team has reached an impasse, then email the instructor. However make sure to cc all members of your team to keep them in the loop, even if they are not directly involved with your question. This should be done for all questions pertaining to the homework, including biological, mathematical, computational, and physical problems.

Leaving things to the last moment will mean that you may feel that you don't have time to do the above and you will just cobble together work that team members have done in parallel. That defeats a major purpose of this course and makes it a lot less educational and fun. Please don't short change yourselves and try to engage and interact with each other.

Format

Because doc files are often don't read properly on different versions of software, please turn in your homework in pdf format. So please export doc or docx files to pdf. If you're using a lot of equations (which you likely will be doing), then the best choice is to use latex. You can collaborate on latex projects online with websites like sharelatex. For source code (python) please don't send in a pdf version. Send the raw text (i.e. source) file. If you have multiple files you are submitting, please submit them as a tarball or as a zip file. Please turn in one main write-up document per assignment, with image files properly integrated in it. Please do not send images separately as it can be hard to figure out how they correspond to the text in your write-up.