• Seminar participation 25%
• Debate – preparation 5%
• Debate 25%
• Essay – plan 10%
• Essay – final 35%

NOTES:

Evaluation

Your final grade consists of seminar participation, preparation for a group debate, participation in the debate itself, a ‘plan’ for what you’re going to write about in your final essay, and the final essay. All assignments must be fulfilled to receive a letter grade. A grade of ‘N’ on one or more of the evaluation criteria results in an automatic final grade of ‘N’ for this course. Hand-in a hard copy of your written assignments at the beginning of seminar on the due date. Email your essay to me on the same day—don’t make any changes or edits to your papers before you send them to me.

Seminar participation
Attendance and participation are mandatory. As a seminar course, you’re expected to regularly respond when I pose open questions to the class and/or raise questions yourself when you have them. In short, I expect that you attend seminar week-in, week-out having read what’s required so that you can participate during seminar.  

Debate
Illegal drugs and drug law enforcement comes with many controversial issues, opinions, and debates in academia and public policy. As part of a sequence of debates, you’ll be assigned to a group and given a subject from four controversial topics that I’ll give details about later on in the semester. Debates will be held in place of the last two seminars in the semester (see course schedule). Assuming six students per topic, randomly assigned teams of three students will participate in four debates lasting 45-50 minutes each. Before reading break, I’ll assign groups and topics. I’ll later assign which ‘side’ of the debate that your group’s arguing for and against in the first week of March.

As part of the debate, you’re to give a series of arguments for your side of the issue and/or against the opposing side of the issue, formal debate style. I expect you to cite statistics and use concreate examples as part of your arguments. Each team will get 12 minutes to present their opening arguments (~4 minutes per student), after which each team will get a chance to respond to arguments made by the opposing team across two rounds of counter-arguing and cross-examination (≤ 8 minutes for each team per round). All students not participating in a given debate will have 15-20 minutes to ask the two debating teams questions (as part of your participation grade). I’ll evaluate each of you individually, so you won’t earn a group mark. Non-participants vote on the winning team. Each member of the winning debate teams get two bonus marks on their final grade.

In preparation for your debate, you will also hand-in (1) two arguments for and two arguments against whatever issue you’ve been assigned to debate and (2) an annotated bibliography of 10 peer-review journal articles. Each written argument should be ~100-150 words in length (i.e., ~400-600 words in total). For the annotated bibliography, give a two or three sentence description of the main idea or argument for each paper you’re citing—don’t summarize the articles or copy/paste the abstracts. Your debate preparation accounts for 5% of your final grade. I’ll post brief guidelines for formatting of the debate preparation hand-in later on in the semester.  

Essay
Formal writing for this course consists of a short ‘plan’ detailing your argument and supporting evidence for the final essay and the final essay itself. I’ll post guidelines online later in the semester. Expect a short list of questions about theory and policy relating to drug law enforcement. You’re to pick one question from the list and write an argument in response to that question. Six weeks before the final essay’s due, you’ll hand-in the ‘plan’ for your essay—think of it as a brief first draft of your final essay that’s meant to give you an opportunity for feedback before writing your final essay. It’s expected that you pick up writing your final essay using the writing you’ve already done for your ‘plan’ but be aware that all of you will have rewriting and editing to do. I except that you’ll make changes to your original writing given the comments I make on your ‘plan’.