environmental

TERM PAPER

You must prepare a 15 to 20 page paper (including figures, tables,and references) on the role of risk assessment in a current environmental issue. The paper should summarize the issue, characterize the risks, discuss risk tradeoffs, and suggest how you think the issue should be resolved. Characterizing the risk means including information from particular risk studies appropriate to your topic. It is not enough to mention that a risk exists. To merit an A, the paper should include some quantitative analysis and should use tools used in the course.

Topics are due by the end of Week Four. An outline of the paper with a bibliography is due by the end of Week Six. The paper is due during Week Eleven. Your resource material should include at least several items from peer-reviewed literature, and should include at least several recent publications. Your paper should not merely list the references, but must demonstrate their use with specific information taken from each source and proper citation. Your paper, as other material submitted to the course, needs to be in your own words. Any material taken directly from a source needs to be placed in quotation marks. Paper must be written specifically for this course. Papers written earlier for other courses are not acceptable.

Term paper topics, outlines, and the full papers should be posted to the conferences by these titles so that everyone may read them. Be sure to use Word in a form compatible with earlier versions, so that the documents are readable by those in the class who do not have the latest version of Word.

Since you will be spending a considerable amount of time on the paper, choose a topic that is relevant to your work or that interests you a great deal. The choice of topic determines the amount of available literature on the topic, and often determines how easy it is to write a good paper on the topic. So keep that in mind when choosing your topic.

The term paper will be evaluated as follows:

Information & Content 70 points

Presentation 20 points

Grammar and Punctuation 10 points