Syllabus is online

• Available at https://soci210.netlify.app
• Contains schedule, assignments, assessment, and other important information
• Updated with links to slides and lecture recordings, and with any schedule changes regularly

Class periods

• Scheduled classes will be a mix of lectures, class-wide discussions, and activities for individuals and small groups
• E.g. discussions with partners, contributing to online document, brainstorming ideas, …
• Content covered during class will be essential to the class, and can be covered on exams

Questions

• General questions (mechanics, content, etc) should go in the "Q and A" channel in Teams
  Students should feel free to answer questions here as well!
• Personal questions about grades, feedback, etc, can be sent to TAs and instructor via Teams
  Use this link to open a chat with them
• You may also contact me directly with more specific questions (e.g. accommodations), preferably on Teams
• Questions and comments are also welcome in class! (Just raise your hand)

Perusall for online reading/evaluation

• Collaborative reading environment
• To register for this class's Perusall, see MyCourses
• Each reading is automatically scored 0 points or 1 point
  If you did the reading but were not given credit, send me a message on Teams!
• Scores based on active engagement with the readings and the annotations https://soci210.netlify.app/pages/perusall.html
• Can miss 4 readings over the semester without penalty

Texts

• (About) 3–4 readings per week
• Textbook (Connerly et al. 2021; Little 2016) for background info and terminology
• Scholarly readings (articles and chapters) examine a particular case / position / method / topic. These readings are the focus of the course

Essay topics

• Three essays over the semester
  (each contributing 18% to your final grade)
• Each student will be randomly assigned two relevant required readings to juxtapose
• Assignments will be distributed at least two weeks before deadline

Essay assessment

• 40% based on peers' assessments
• 40% based on TAs' assessments
• 20% for assessing others' essays

Essay content

• Summary of relevant arguments, methods and findings from readings
• Parallels between readings
• Divergences between the readings
• Contextual synthesis of the readings -- what does the pair of readings do in the context of the rest of the class?

Two exams

• Midterm: 80 minutes; in-class (Feb 21)
• Final: 3 hours; through exams office
• Both intended to take much less than the allotted time

Exam structure

• Multiple choice questions
• Short answer
  - ~ 1–2 paragraphs per response
  - selection of prompts to choose from

Reference (crib) sheet

• Composed by groups of 10–15 students ahead of exam
  randomly assigned
• Approved and printed by instructor

"Generative AI"

• The use of "generative AI" is prohibited in this class
• E.g. Microsoft Copilot (provided by McGill), Apple Intelligence, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama, etc.
• Turning in text written by an LLM as your own work is a violation of McGill's policy on plagiarism.

"Typical" text

• The technology that makes generative AI work is essentially like the predictive text on your phone, but trained on as much of the internet as corporations can get their hands on.
  One thousand Redditors (or Github projects) in a trenchcoat
• The models are trained solely to sound unsurprising, not to recognize important or interesting ideas.
  "When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind"

Writing is its own end

• Struggling to compose an essay or summarize a reading is useful—that is where the thinking (and learning) happens. The final result is just an artifact.
  "We can also save time by undercooking fish, but it’s not ideal." — Eryk Salvaggio
• Using AI to write or summarize will hinder your learning
• AI-generated code contains frequent mistakes that can be hard even for experts to spot
• You are here to learn, and AI will hinder that learning

Islands of highly specialized topics

• E.g. gender in the workplace
• E.g. _social movements and language use

Hard to describe the "boundary" of sociology

• Any topic has a sociological aspect

Hard to slice into distinct pieces

• There is no obviously correct way to divide sociology into smaller subdisciplines

Sociology is bound by a perspective

• Sociology is not what topics are studies, but how those topics are studied