If you got a poor grade (<70) you did almost ceratinly one or more of the following:

If you got a poor grade (<70) on your term paper you did almost certainly one or more of the following:

1. You did not use primary references. See The term paper guidelines for what a primary reference is ( http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/term.paper.html ).

NB: If all or most of your references were not primary you got an automatic 50. This will be true for the final draft as well.

2. Your citations were in an improper format. See http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/term.paper.html for the format I would like. Do not use "Bakker 46" for a citation in your text. Use the author plus the year "Bakker, 1986".

An especially big problem was not citing the scientists work at all or very little in the text. Make sure you cite the relevant source where you use the idea in the text.

3. You did not cite individual papers in an edited volume individually. You must cite the scientists work by their names, individually if you are using a paper from an edited volume of collected papers. The names of the editors should NOT be substituted.

4. Did not use the fact that birds ARE dinosaurs when making sweeping statements about dinosaurs, such as, "Dinosaurs are extinct".

5. Demonstrated that you do not understand that Science consists of an endless process of constructing and testing hypotheses, not proving things. You prove things in math and logic, neither are Science.

Also, please paginate your papers, so when the single staple comes out, we don't have to spend a half hour trying to figure out how to put it back together.