Graduate Student Professional Development
Courses
The professional development courses listed below are open to all graduate students. GRAD courses carry 1.0 semester hours of credit, are graded pass/fail, and do not fulfill degree requirements.
Post-doctoral Fellows are welcome to audit these courses. GRAD 810 requires permission of the instructor and carries 2 semester hours of credit.
The Graduate School also sponsors fellowship courses (GRAD 720 and 722). GRAD 720 carries 1 semester hour of credit. GRAD 722 carries 1 semester hour of credit for two semesters. Students are competitively selected before the academic year begins and are enrolled automatically in the seminars.
How to Register
Graduate students simply register for these courses as they would for any other graduate course. These professional development courses are graded pass/fail, and the credits do not count toward graduate degree requirements.
For information concerning registration at Carolina, please see the Web site of the Office of the University Registrar.
Courses for Fall 2008
- GRAD 721 (section 001) – Research Ethics
- Instructor: Doug MacLean, PhD (Philosophy department)
- Thursday, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, Graduate Student Center
- Carries 1 semester hour of credit
- Registration via the University Registrar
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The purpose of this course is to discuss in serious and systematic ways some of the important issues in research ethics. This is not a course in moral theory, and neither is it a course that aims only to review rules and codes of conduct. Rather, the aim is to increase our awareness of the nature of ethical issues in research and some ways and methods for reasoning constructively about them. The topics we will address include (but are not restricted to): falsification of data, plagiarism, professional codes of ethics, issues in mentoring, peer review and authorship, the use of statistics, intellectual property, conflicts of interest, the use of human and animal subjects in research, environmental ethics, issues involving women and under-represented minorities in the professions, and the social responsibilities of researchers.
The course will be conducted as a seminar and will meet eight times during the semester. All readings, case studies, and instructional material are available online. Participants will do the readings for each topic and take a self-paced quiz to test their comprehension of the material before the meeting in which the material is discussed. The class sessions will be devoted to a discussion of the principles relevant to the specific topics and a discussion of the complexities and difficulties of the cases. The requirements of the course are to do the online material before each seminar and to attend the seminars. There will be no additional exams or papers.
Preparing International Teaching Assistants Program
- GRAD 810 –Communicating in the American Classroom for ITAs
- This course is designed to increase communicative competence in the classroom for international teaching assistants (ITAs). The focus of the course is teaching skills. The goals of the course are: (1) to practice American English pronunciation and grammar; (2) to create an awareness of cross-cultural differences; and (3) to understand and practice basic teaching skills used in the American classroom. This is a two (2) credit, pass/fail course offered both Fall and Spring semesters.