TO: Med II Class

FROM: Dr. Andrew Latus

RE: Assignments for Ethics/Humanities/Health Law component of ISD II

DATE: Feb. 5, 2002

________________________________________________________________________

At the start of the ISD I course, all of you chose between a couple of different sets of course requirements for the Ethics/Humanities/Health Law (E/H/HL) component of the ISD I & II course. You elected to either write three short essays during the ISD I & II course or to write one long essay that would be due toward the end of the ISD II course. You also elected to either keep a journal and meet periodically with an instructor to discuss it or else to write a series of article summaries based on the readings for the various ISD E/H/HL sessions.

So far, however, students’ compliance with the E/H/HL requirements has been inconsistent. Some of you have been doing what is asked of you, some have not. So far, it has also been true that the E/H/HL instructors have not been particularly active in ensuring that students do the required assignments. Clearly, this is not fair to those students who have been completing the work required of them. This memo is to let you know that we will, from here on, be carefully enforcing the requirements for the E/H/HL course and that we will be doing so in a somewhat different way than in the past.

Part of the reason why some of you have not been completing the required assignments may be because the place of the E/H/HL component of the ISD program has, in the past, not been clearly defined. While it has traditionally been run as a separate course with requirements distinct from the rest of the program, this in fact is not how the E/H/HL component is officially supposed to run. Its requirements are meant to comprise part of the requirements for the various units of the ISD course. From now on, this is how it will be run.

What this will mean is that any E/H/HL requirements that are due during a particular unit of the ISD course will now be counted as being part of the requirements for that unit. They may be treated as a necessary condition for completing the unit or they may be treated as counting for a certain number of the points in your grade for that unit. This will depend on the wishes of the course chair for that unit and will be announced at the beginning of each unit. For the Women’s Health unit, the essay due on Feb. 10 is being treated as a necessary condition of finishing the unit. What this means is that, if you have selected the option of doing three short essays over the ISD course, you will not complete the women’s health unit until you pass in an acceptable essay. The same will hold for article summaries. As for those of you who are doing the journal assignment, a period during which you should meet with your journal supervisor will be announced shortly.

Please note that this does not mean we will be imposing any new requirements upon you. All we will be doing is enforcing the requirements that were already put in place. If you have any questions about this, please see me.

Andrew Latus

(for Andrew Latus, John Crellin and Barbara Barrowman)