If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to ask in lecture, during office hours, on the course newsgroup, or by email.
Graded homeworks and exams
- You can pick up your graded written homeworks and exams from the TA office during office hours. Under normal circumstances, your graded work should be ready to pick up at most 10 working days after you submit it.
- We will post homework and exam grades on Compass Gradebook ('My Grades' under 'My Tools'). We will also post anonymous homework and exam grades on the course web page, so that students can see their relative standing in the class.
- We will post homework solutions a few days after the submission deadline; we will post exam solutions immediately after the exam ends. Posted solutions will include suggested rubrics for grading each problem; if the graders modify the suggested rubrics, we will post final rubrics when grading is complete.
Regrade requests
- Please check that your grades are tabulated and recorded correctly. If you notice a mistake, please bring your graded work to the TA or the instructor; we will correct it immediately.
- If you believe that your homework or exam has been graded unfairly, please request a regrade. Homework will be regraded by the TA; exams will be regraded by the instructor. To request a regrade, resubmit the work in question along with a brief written explanation why you think you were graded unfairly. (For example, "My answer to problem 2 is correct; see the posted solutions." or "My grade does not match the posted rubric.") Don't revise or explain your answer; we can only grade what you submitted the first time.
- Regrade requests must be submitted at most two weeks after the homework or exam is returned. Except for arithmetic mistakes, late regrade requests will be ignored.
- If you submit a regrade request, your entire homework or exam will be regraded from scratch. Your grade may go down.
- We will readily admit, apologize for, and correct our mistake if you have been graded unfairly. However, please remember that "unfairly" means your grade is inconsistent with the published grading standard, or that you were graded more harshly than other people in the class, not just that you think the grading standard is too harsh. Please also keep in mind that each homework point is worth less than 0.1% of your final course grade. Frivolous regrade requests will be met with the scorn they deserve.
Final course grades
- We will determine final course grades as follows.
- Drop each student's lowest homework grade. If some homeworks have more weight than others, we will drop the homework that leaves the highest weighted homework average.
- Compute everyone's average. Course work is weighted as follows: 25% for homework (both written and oral), 20% for each midterm, and 35% for the final exam.
- Anyone with an course average over 95% gets an A+ (this is not the only way to get an A+).
- Anyone with a homework average below 40% or an course average below 25%, automatically gets an F. (You can fail in other ways too, see below.)
- Determine letter grade cutoffs, excluding extreme outliers at both ends of the curve. The mean is a borderline B-/C+, and each standard deviation is worth a full letter grade. Thus, the B+/B cutoff is 2/3 standard deviations above the mean.
- Compute final letter grades from averages, except for the outliers from steps 4 and 5.
- Adjust grades (only upwards!) at the instructor's whim.
Extra credit from any extra credit problems that may be given will be taken into account after the letter grades have been determined without extra credit.
- Over the last few semesters the mean (of the final weighted score) is about 70% and the minimum passing score is about 50%.
Webpage contents generously borrowed/copied from those of Jeff Erickson.