PHYS 487 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Course Grading
Course grading will proceed in compliance with University policy as given in Article 3, Part 1 of the Student Code.
General grading rules
We use a holistic grading scale for all assignments/evaluations in the course, as follows:
- 100% for demonstrating full understanding of a problem (up to trivial mistakes)
- 80% for demonstrating good understanding, but with non-trivial mistakes
- 60% for demonstrating decent understanding, but with with significant gaps
- 40% for demonstrating a clear lacking in understanding and unproductive approaches to problem solving
- 20% for showing little to no understanding and no path to solution of a problem
Homework
- Problem sets are posted by Wednesday.
- Deadline for submitting solutions on Gradescope is the end of the following Tuesday (11:59:59pm).
- Convert your homework into a good-quality and well-legible PDF and upload it there before the deadline (properly sorted by problem, please).
- Late assignments will be marked down 20% for each 24-hour period beyond the due date, i.e., if your raw score is x, your score n days late would be (1 - 0.2 * n) * x; it does not matter, for example, if you're 1 minute late or 23 hours late -- both count as 1 day late.
- If you disagree with a grader's assessment you may request a regrade on gradescope. Regrades have to be submitted within 1 week after grades of an assignment were released.
- Presentation matters -- your submission must convince the grader that your understood the material
- For poor submission quality (not legible, pages not sorted, etc.), graders may grade your submission as a 0 and ask that you resubmit with better quality to get credit.
- Working in groups is strongly encouraged, but you must submit your own work. Submitting copied work is plagiarism.
- Grades and solutions are available one week after submission deadline.
Computational exercises
- Three exercise sets will be released over the course of the semester; you will get four weeks to work on them.
- Submission is on Gradescope, as separate problem sets
- To submit, please convert your solved notebook, incl all relevant output, into a decent-looking PDF that includes all requested output and graphs.
- The computational problems are graded by two criteria: (1) is the code working, and (2) does it replicate the known physics well?
- For full credit: Answer all questions, including the ones that ask for interpreting the physics! Full points are only given if your code clearly produces results that are in agreement with the expected physics.
- Note: for computational exercises there's often not one single way to do it right; also, the results should only confirm physics that you already know. For that reason we do not publish 'correct' solutions for the computational parts.
Final grade composition
Your final grade will be based upon the course components as follows:
| Course Component | Number of Assignments | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
|
Discussion sessions (2 lowest will be dropped) |
11 (for participation; all equally weighted) | 15% |
|
Homework (3 lowest will be dropped) |
12 regular homework sets and 3 computational homework sets (all equally weighted) | 20% |
| Midterm exams I and II | 2 (equally weighted) | 30% |
| Final Exam | 1 | 35% |
| 100% | ||
Final Letter grades
The grading scheme for your final percentage score to letter grades is as follows:
| Letter Grade | Percentage Range |
|---|---|
| A+ | 98%-100% |
| A | 92%-98% |
| A- | 90%-92% |
| B+ | 88%-90% |
| B | 82%-88% |
| B- | 80%-82% |
| C+ | 78%-80% |
| C | 72%-78% |
| C- | 70%-72% |
| D+ | 68%-70% |
| D | 62%-68% |
| D- | 60%-62% |
| F | less than 60% |
Adjustment of the grading scheme ("Curving")
We do not curve individual assignments (such as exams). For each assignment, your percentage score is an honest reflection of your mastery of the material as tested.
However, the grading scheme shown above may be adjusted to reflect the overall performance of the class. Specifically, if the median final grade of the class is well below our expectation (i.e., we made some assignments much harder than we expected), the grading scheme will be adjusted to lower the threshold for the next letter grade. We normally expect the median final grade to be at leastin the B range.