Grading for courses is based on two requirements: (1) interactive attendance and active participation, and (2) completion of two examinations.

1. Attendance: Taking courses at the Professional School of Breathing Sciences is about sharing knowledge and experience with colleagues, including other students and faculty. Attendance provides a fundamental and indispensable context for communication, a kind of experiential education that is difficult to objectively assess.

Live attendance of all courses is required. Listening to session recordings for session review purposes will not meet the attendance requirement. Live participation among student-colleagues, as well as among professors and students, is considered to be a key learning component of coursework. In addition to live interaction, there is ongoing live polling of students, including comments, questions, opinions, suggestions, and general feedback from student-colleagues.

If a student misses more than one hour and up to half the hours of a course, the student is required to listen to the course recordings and to obtain a grade of “A” on at least one of the course examinations to receive credit for the course (a grade of “B”), and a grade of “A” on both examinations to receive a grade of “A” for the course. If more than half the hours of a course are missed, the student will not receive credit for the course.

Failure to attend classes will NOT result in students being automatically dropped or withdrawn from courses.

2. Examinations: Each course (one unit, 15 hours of class time) is scheduled as two one-day sessions, two Saturdays or two Sundays, usually two weeks apart. There will be TWO exams given for each course, the first one on the Wednesday or Thursday immediately preceding the second session, and the second one on the Wednesday or Thursday immediately following the final session. Each examination is scheduled for two hours and is not taken during class time.

All examinations are “open book,” and consist of 10 to 20 short answer essay questions that in most cases emphasize concepts, principles, and critical thinking. The examinations are electronically completed PDF or HTML files emailed to each student at the scheduled time, completed online in the spaces provided on the form, and then uploaded to the inbox of the professor within the allotted time. Exam questions are scored 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 points and are averaged with other questions to give a total score; to receive credit for a course, the score must be at least 3.0 (B) on BOTH examinations.