Tamara J Ferguson | Psychology 3510


The homework for this course is fairly straightforward: the assignments consist of multiple-choice quizzes which you must complete by their due dates. If you have already installed Shockwave on your computer, you can click on the homework links in the course calendar to open the SoQuiz program directly. You can also launch the program by clicking on the above graphic.

Homework Description

There are 18 quizzes in all, each worth 10 points. This amounts to a total of 180 points, i.e., about 29% of your grade, as indicated in the web page for grades.
Each quiz has its particular focus. For example, Quiz 1 covers chapter 1 of the textbook. Quiz 2 is on chapter 9. However, Quiz 3 covers both chapters 1 and 9 together, and thus has more questions and takes longer to complete. Later on in the course you will find that some quizzes are even longer, since they combine all the previous chapters in preparation for tests 1 and 2. And the last Quiz 20 covers everything to help you practice for the final exam.
Students receive all 10 points for a quiz merely by submitting the results on time with a score of at least 90%. If they score lower than 90%, they will have to keep practicing until reaching that minimum acceptable level. The quizzes are not timed: you they can take as long as you want. However, it wouldn’t make much sense to drag out a quiz very long. You see, you can take the quizzes over and over and over again to master the questions and answers —and should do so! After several attempts, you’ll eventually be able to score the 90% necessary, and can then click the button to submit the results and receive full credit. In other words, it would prove more productive to quickly guess the answers at first, learning which ones are right or wrong, than fretting over each question, trying to get the answers right with only one attempt. A good goal would be to try and complete a quiz using less than about 30 seconds per question —since that is the average amount of time students typically need on the exams. If it takes you longer than that to score 90% on the quizzes, you really do need to keep practicing them.
Regardless, even after turning in an assignment, students should keep practicing the quizzes over and over and over again, because the software selects and organizes the questions randomly —and thus no two quizzes are ever alike. In point of fact, many of the questions that you encounter in the quizzes are often very similar to those in the exams. Consequently, the more you practice the quizzes and master whatever concepts the questions cover, the better prepared you will be to achieve a top score on the tests.
To receive the corresponding 10 points for each quiz, students must submit the results before 12:00:00 midnight (Utah time), the day indicated on the course calendar. As specified in the rules, if the internet server receives them even one second late, at midnight or later, you lose 25% of the points, no matter the reason for the delay —understandable, questionable, or completely ridiculous. The points then continue to drop by 25% for every day late after that, i.e., after three days... it is a lost cause. The sole leniency is that I do not count weekends or holidays when the university is not in session. Moreover, at the midnight deadline for the last homework quiz assigned before an exam, the quizzes will no longer be available, nor will they be worth anything anymore —not even partial points. The quizzes will not be available again until the testing windows have closed. Even then, remember that no homework assigned before an exam will be worth credit after the exam: it makes no sense whatsoever to take a test and then study for it.
The basic admonition here is: submit your homework quizzes days before they are due. You never know if the internet might go down, or your computer will crash, or a last-minute emergency might arise, or there could be a huge traffic jam on the way home from work that day, or... it simply proves too difficult to score 90% without practicing a particular quiz multiple times for many hours. Ergo, don't wait until the very last minute and run the risk of losing points, especially with the longer and harder “review” quizzes.

How to Submit an Assignment

Upon completing a quiz with a score of no less than 90%, you can click on the “paper airplane” button in the program to transmit your results.

Unless your computer has inadvertently lost its internet connection, you will then see a screen with boxes where you need to fill in your name, surname, and e-mail address. NOTE: You must type your e-mail address very carefully: if there is even one wrong letter, you will not receive a confirmation of the submission.

Click the “paper airplane” button again and the SoQuiz software will transmit your quiz results.

Upon receiving the submission, the internet server will “time stamp” it and send an automated confirmation to your e-mail address for your records.

If, perchance, the cyberdeities frown upon you, and the internet has crashed, the software will warn you to copy-and-paste your quiz results into a text document or an e-mail message so that you can send them as soon as your connection is reestablished.

A Request

You will be happy to know that the SoQuiz software has performed flawlessly for many years now, so I seriously doubt you will experience any problems. If, however, a programming error should occur, or you find any other mistakes in either form or content, please send an e-mail message as soon as possible, with a detailed description of what you were doing at the time.