Attendance & preparation

How important is attendance in this course?  I will not be taking attendance, nor will I deliberately write exam questions on material from class in order to "catch" you.  Nevertheless, anything that comes up in class discussions is fair game for exam questions (and/or to enrich your answers), and of course I tend to ask exam questions on what I think is important and tend to deal with what is important in class lectures.  In short, your presence in class will bring a reward without my explicit intervention.  (I do expect you to come to class, of course.)

I expect you to come prepared to class, meaning at a minimum that you have done the assigned reading.  This will enable you to follow the lecture better, to feel more confident in asking questions, in participating in class discussion, and so on.  If in my judgment the students in the course are frequently coming to class ill-prepared, I reserve the right to institute a program of quizzes on the reading, with a maximum weight of 25 (i.e., 1/5 of the overall grade:  25 out of 100+25).