Frequently Asked Questions

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Frequently Asked Questions

This page contains answers to common questions asked by students, along with some tips and tricks that I have found useful and presented here as questions.
  • How do I find research on a topic?
  • When do I need to cite information in an assignment ?
  • When are assignments actually due ?
  • I created my assignment in one of the UCF labs, and now it's lost. What should I do?
  • What is wrong with my presentation? I included neat images, fancy fonts, and sound bites and now they don't work.
  • When and where are grades posted?

   

How Do I find information about a topic?

The answer to this question depends on what type of information you need.

 For company financial data, there are several good sites:

www.nasdaq.com (free site)

www.sec.gov (free site)

finance.yahoo.com (free site)

www.hoovers.com (subscription site unless you access it from a UCF computer)

www.moodys.com (subscription site unless you access it from a UCF computer)

For Industry data:

www.netadvantage.standardandpoors.com (subscription site unless you access it from a UCF computer)

www.fastcompany.com (for entrepreneurship research)

www.bizstats.com (key industry ratios, broken down by type of legal form of business)

For SIC/NAICS codes:

www.melissadata.com (free site for basic searches; fee-based for advanced searches)

For Salary Comps:

www.salary.com (free site for basic searches; fee-based for advanced searches)

Contract Manufacturing Companies:

http://www.thomasnet.com/products/contract-manufacturing-17871203-1.html

For International Commerce; Import/Export Law; Customs Brokers, etc.:

U.S. Commercial Service, United States Department of Commerce website:

www.export.gov

 

 

 


   

 

When do I need to cite information in an assignment?

The simple answer to this question is every time you use third party information, it needs to be cited. However, experience has shown that most students were taught differently regarding the meaning of this statement. So, regardless of what you may have been told by others, here are the rules that I expect students to follow when submitting any assignment to me for a grade:

1) Direct quotes - Always put the quote in quotation marks, regardless of length, and cite the author immediately after the quote.

2) Indirect quotes - These include any amount of paraphrasing or altering the quote by changing some or all of the words, or combining quotes from multiple authors into a single statement. Cite all authors immediately after the statement.

3) Numbers, figures, or other lists of data - It is virtually impossible to put numbers, figures, or other data into a document without getting them from a third-party source. Therefore, all numbers, figures, or lists of data must be cited immediately following the paragraph or table in which they appear.

All citations must appear in the text on the same page where the third-party material is used. All works researched must be included on the works cited page, regardless of whether they are actually cited in the text.


   

When are Assignments actually due?

Assignments are due at the start of class on the due date specified, and in the manner specified in the syllabus. Students who wait until the last minute to print their assignments in one of the labs run the risk of not being in class when the class starts. Not only is coming into class late because you were waiting for your assignment to print disruptive, but it also results in the assignment being marked as late.

Electronic submission of assignments to www.turnitin.com must be made prior to midnight on the date the assignment is due in class.   


   

 

 I created my assignment in the computer lab, and now it's lost. What should I do?

Every semester I get about a dozen students in my office with disks that they created in one of the UCF computer labs that they either can't open, or that don't contain the assignments that they thought they had saved to the disk. 

The UCF labs are set up with very tight tolerances for the types of files that can be loaded and accessed, in order to minimize virus problems. Consequently, they often miswrite data to floppy disks, and if they crash or if you log off, they are programmed not to save any data that was created by you. This makes use of the UCF labs a high-risk adventure when you're trying to create an assignment; especially at the last minute.

If you must use the UCF labs to create your assignments, make certain that you email yourself a copy of the file and print a hard copy as well as copying the file to disk  before you log off. 

"The lab ate my file" is not an acceptable excuse for a late assignment.


   

What is wrong with my presentation? I included neat images, fancy fonts, and sound bites and now they don't work?

PowerPoint is a strange application. It is designed so that you can do a lot of fancy things to jazz up your presentation. Unfortunately, it is also a resource hog. So, to minimize the file size and allow the file to fit on a disk, the PowerPoint default is to "point to" sound, font, and image files, rather than actually insert them into the presentation. When you add a sound, font or image file to your presentation, all you are really doing is pointing PowerPoint to the file location on your hard disk where the actual file resides. When you copy the presentation to a floppy or CD, PowerPoint does not copy those files. It only copies the pointers. You have to reset the defaults to include all of those files, or your presentation will not run properly on another computer.

It is far better to create a simple presentation without all the "bells and whistles" than risk not having a working presentation when you need it.


 

When and where are grades posted?

I always try and post grades for all tests and other assignments prior to the next class meeting. All grades are posted on Webcourses@UCF. It is the student's responsibility to log on to Webcourses to retrieve a grade for an assignment. Webcourses may be accessed through the student's MyUCF account

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