1.   Class meetings and Office information. This class meets in BSA A404, Wednesday 11:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.. My office is A421. E-mail is jweinrot@bsa3.kent.edu and phone is 330 672-1150. If I am not able to answer your call please leave a message. You will also have my home e-mail to be used judiciously, but I will not copy the address to this public document.  I will be available in my office on Wednesday from 2:00 to 3:00 and 4:15 to 5:15, on Thursday from 1:30 to 3:30, and other times by appointment.

2.   STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES: In accordance with University policy, if you have a documented disability and require accommodations to obtain equal access in this course, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester or when given an assignment for which an accommodation is required. Students with disabilities must verify their eligibility through the Office of Student Disability Services (SDS) in the Michael Schwartz Student Service Center (181 MSC) (672-3391).

3.   ENROLLMENT: It is the student's responsibility to ensure proper enrollment in classes. You are advised to review your official class schedule during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure proper enrollment. Should you determine an error in your class schedule, you have two weeks from the beginning of the semester to correct it with your advising office. If registration errors are not corrected by this date and you continue to attend and participate in classes for which you are not officially enrolled, you are advised that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester.

4.   Last day to drop an individual class.  If necessary, determine what is the last date to drop an individual class without special permission. If you stop attending a class without officially dropping, the probable result will be a grade of F.

5.   Cheating -- any form of copying another student's work and submitting it as your own will result in one or more of the consequences specified in the university regulations, for all students responsible for the incident. Obviously where students are given a team assignment the two or more persons both attach their names to the work. It is a quasi-legal requirement to mention this in the syllabus. I do not really regard it as relevant for the students of this class.

6.    GRADE WEIGHTS:

Task	Percent of final grade
Outline for research paper	10%
Mid-semester draft of research paper	25%
Final submission of research paper	35%
Performance on editorial panel – outlines	10%
Performance on editorial panel – mid-semester drafts	10%
Performance on editorial panel – final submissions	10%

(7). Academic complaints. University regulations, some of which are reprinted in your copy of the KSU telephone directory, govern many aspects of our classes, including academic complaints.

 

Part II Purpose and Format of the Course

 

B_AD 84266 as taught by this instructor is designed to bring together second year doctoral students from any department in the KSU Graduate School of Management in order to collaborate in the advancement of research the enrolled students are pursuing.  This collaboration takes the form of presentation in three stages of each student’s ongoing work (outline with lit review, first draft of a submissible paper, second draft of same) and critique and discussion by the instructor and the rest of the class.  Ideally the research being advanced will relate to each student’s dissertation.

 

My objective for this class is that each of us will benefit in his ongoing research from the synergy of the diverse perspectives both of our respective disciplines and of our unique personal approaches to research.

 

Thus it is in the nature of this course that the research topics on which we will collaborate will consist of several highly diverse topics.  Further, it is probable that the content of the literature we will read and discuss, as well as the students’ work, will be of an advanced technical nature at least in part.  Therefore, the class will rely on each student author to be our mentor as to the meaning of the content of his work and supporting articles from the literature. 

 

In the earlier weeks of the semester we will focus on discussion of a number of journal articles put forward for us by each member of the class, as important background from the literature pertaining respectively to each person’s ongoing research.  Given the advanced and often technical nature of the papers we will discuss, responsibility to lead the discussion will fall to the individual student identified in the class schedule for that meeting.  The rest of us are responsible for bringing to class sets of systematic notes on the journal article or articles to be discussed.  My general expectation is that we will have read 3 or 4 journal articles, as listed in the reading list, at each of these early class sessions, and will discuss two or more of these, with extensive follow-up discussion of how these papers relate to the student’s intended work in the course.

 

Each student in the class will submit work for review in three stages – outline, mid-semester working draft, and final draft of the paper. Note that the class will need from each of you a designated sub-set from among the papers in your outline’s lit review, as the papers we need especially to read as reviewers in order to assess the relevance and accuracy of your proposed work within its topic or field.  In order that these papers are accessible to us in a timely fashion, you need to provide either a reliable online source, including the university library database, or hard copies if online access is not readily available.   Please be sure to mark some papers from your lit review with asterisks in front of them (***), thereby indicating the papers that we all will access and read before we get to the in-class discussion of your outline.  Note that this sub-set of articles may include one or more of the papers you discussed with us in the early part of the semester, or not, depending on what you decide is best.

Major point -- We need access to these background papers in a timely fashion, that is, in time to have read them before we evaluate your outline.

 

At each stage of your work you will receive a critique from the other members of the class acting as reviewers, and from the instructor.  At each stage the work of each student will be posted on this web site or distributed among the class in hard copy or by e-mail.  A standard format will be provided for the evaluation.  Throughout our model is the review process conducted by refereed journals.  You are evaluating your fellow students’ work-in-progress in terms of its readiness for publication.  Actual journal reviewers end with a recommendation to accept the submitted article, have it returned for revision and resubmission, or reject entirely.  Moving toward that conclusion the reviewers often rate the submission on a number of features.  That is the format we will use, except that we will leave out the final recommendation.  In our format each student conducting a review will assign points from 1 to 10 for a number of items and sum these points.  Please be aware from the start that your work as a reviewer involves providing extensive comments and recommendations.

 

After each review all students as reviewers will be graded by those whose work they have reviewed, on how well they have done their jobs. Again, the instructor’s format for grading of reviews will be used. 

 

It is important to note that the scores assigned by your fellows in the seminar to your ongoing work will be of significant interest to the instructor and designed to give you maximum feedback and insight for improvement, but these scores will not be part of your grade.  0nly the instructor’s grade will count on your outline, first draft, and second draft.  The same considerations apply to your work in presenting the three critiques, but even more so, i.e. I will be guided somewhat by how helpful your fellow students found your critique work to be.