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. (What do you expect from an algorithms course?)
- 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 raw average, which excludes extra credit. Course work is weighted as follows: 30% for homework (both written and oral), 20% for each midterm, and 30% for the final exam.
- Compute everyone's adjusted average, which includes extra credit, even from the dropped homework. Extra credit points are not necessarily worth the same as regular points.
- Anyone with an adjusted course average over 95% gets an A+.
- Anyone with a homework average below 50% or an adjusted course average below 25%, automatically gets an F. (This is not the only way to fail!)
- 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 adjusted averages, except for the outliers from steps 4 and 5.
- Adjust grades (only upwards!) at the instructor's whim.
This algorithm ensures that extra credit can only increase your grade, that other people's extra credit does not affect your grade, and that the curve isn't skewed by the handful of geniuses and doofuses in every class.
- In Fall 2005, the mean was about 70% and the standard deviation was about 8%, so the minimum passing average was 54%. In Spring 2007, the mean was about 77% and the standard deviation was about 10%, so the minimum passing average was 57%. In Fall 2008, the mean was about 69% and the standard deviation was about 10%, so the minimum passing average was 50%.