Although your final grade for 12.000 will be a "Pass" or will not appear on your record at all ("No Record"), you should know that the instructor for this subject (hereafter "KVH") does not like the P/NR policy and does not simply judge your performance as passing or not. On the grade sheet that you receive at the end of the semester, you'll see the actual grade that he has given you, even though it does not actually appear in your permanent record. However, this grade is an important message from KVH to you: it reflects how closely you met his (and your!) expectations for performance.

During the first week of class, the students in each section will be divided into ten teams and each team will be assigned an undergraduate teaching fellow (TF) and one or more professional mentors. An important aspect of Mission 2005 is its emphasis on teamwork. As a consequence, 70% of your grade depends on the performance of your team and only 30% on your individual performance.
 
The Individual Grade Component
 
Thirty percent of your grade reflects how well you, as an individual, met KVH's expectations over the course of the semester. He expects that you will...
 
Attend all scheduled class and team meetings.
 
Arrive promptly for these meetings.
 
Do all reading for the Case Study discussions. You will not be tested on the content of the readings, but you should develop sufficient familiarity with the content that you can discuss it intelligently.
 
Participate aggressively in the Case Study discussions.
 
Contribute to website development and the final presentation.
 
Keep a personal journal in which you describe the activities of your team and your personal perceptions of the team's progress. Only KVH and the graduate teaching assistants (TAs) will read them. You must make at least one dated entry in the journal each week; a typical entry might be a paragraph or two in length. You must turn in the latest entries in your journal once each month by sending them in the text of an email to Karen Viskupic (kmviskup@mit.edu) if you are in the Atlantis I section and to Cam Wobus (cwobus@mit.edu) if you are in the Atlantis II section.
 
Pull your weight during team activities.
 
Be candid in your assessment of ideas and actions.
 
Treat others and their ideas with respect.
 
Based on his assessment of how well you meet these expectations, KVH will assign your individual grade component at the end of the semester. At any time during the semester, you should feel free to contact him to learn his preliminary assessment of your performance.
 
The Team Grade Component
   
Your section has two assignments for the semester:
   
1 Develop a content-rich website that describes your final project design. Some guidelines and hints for developing a great website can be found by following the link to Website Specifications. The most effective way of coordinating your collective efforts on the website will be for each team to designate a "web guru" who will meet frequently with the web gurus from other teams to post and maintain a site for the entire section starting early in the semester. One of the teaching staff will work with the gurus at the beginning of the semester to familiarize them with the web creation resources available. Remember - even though you may not be the web guru for your team, you also have the responsibility to help develop website content and participate in website design. Creating web content is remarkably easy once you get the hang of it, and you should develop this important communication skill early in your undergraduate career.
   
2 Make a final, one-hour, oral presentation of your design on December 5, 2001. This presentation will be open to the entire MIT community and will be broadcast over the web. In addition, a panel of ocean science and engineering experts have been invited to attend the back-to-back presentations of the Atlantis I and II sections and to critique them in an open forum. Each presentation should be illustrated using Power Point graphics and should be considered formal. Because it would be logistically impossible for everyone in your section to speak during the presentation, the staff recommends that each team elect one of its members to join a "presentation committee" that will choreograph and make the final presentation. Again, this committee member should not bear sole responsibility for the work involved in developing the presentation; pull your weight!
   
Although KVH expects that each team will coordinate their efforts to complete these assignments, each team will establish its own performance expectations at the beginning of the semester and the final team grade will reflect how well those expectations were met. Here's how it works.... At the first team meeting of the semester, your team members should talk among themselves and decide what you must accomplish by the end of the semester in order to deserve a team grade of "A". Articulated in a single paragraph and submitted to your UTF, this set of expectations constitutes a contract between your team and KVH. At the end of the semester, your team will be asked to review this paragraph, determine how well you met those expectations, and propose a grade for your team. If you fulfilled all of your expectations, you deserve an "A". If you fulfilled most of them, you deserve a "B". If you were only about half successful, you deserve a "C". Anything less and you don't deserve to pass. You will submit the grade your team believes it deserves to KVH. At the same time, the UTF assigned to your team will make an independent assessment of your team's performance. Based on these two assessments, KVH and TAs will assign the final team grade .
   
The Final Grade
 
Your final grade will be computed by KVH as the 70%-30% weighted mean of your team grade component (i.e., your team's final grade) and your individual grade component.