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
- Graded homework and exams will be distributed in discussion sections. You can also 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 two weeks after you submit it.
- We will post homework and exam grades on Compass Gradebook ('My Grades' under 'My Tools'). We will also post anonymized midterm grades (just a sorted list of numbers) 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 Jeff or one of the TAs; 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 TAs; Jeff will regrade exams. 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 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?)
- Compute everyone's raw total, which excludes extra credit points. Course work is weighted as follows: 30% for homework (both written and oral) and 70% for exams.
- We will assign roughly 35 homework problems during the semester. We will drop your five lowest homework scores; each remaining problem is worth 1% of your raw total. (If we assign more problems, we will still only count the 30 highest scores. If we assign fewer problems, we will still drop the five lowest scores and weigh the others more heavily. We will not drop zeros that result from cheating offenses.)
- There will be two midterm exams, each with five questions, and a final exam with seven questions. We will drop your three lowest exam problem scores; each of the remaining 14 exam problems is worth 5% of your raw total.
- Compute everyone's adjusted total, which includes extra credit points. Extra credit points are not necessarily worth the same as regular points.
- Anyone with an adjusted total over 95% automatically gets an A+. In a typical 100-student class, this rule applies only to the top 2 or 3 students.
- Anyone with an adjusted total below 33% or a homework total below 50%, or who otherwise does not appear to be making a good-faith effort, automatically gets an F. (This is not the only way to fail!) In a typical 100-student class, this rule applies only to the bottom 2 or 3 students.
- Determine letter grade cutoffs from raw totals, 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. For example, 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 outliers in every class.
We may periodically post expected letter grades to Compass, based on the work that has been graded so far. We will always compute those letter grades by simple averaging, without dropping low homework and exam scores and without adding extra credit points.
Here are approximate statistics from the last four semesters Jeff taught 473 or 573, using the same grading algorithm. In general, the scores in 573 tend to be higher and more tightly clustered, despite the more difficult course material.
Class Semester Mean ± stdev Min pass 473 Fall 2006 64% ± 12% 40% 573 Spring 2007 77% ± 10% 57% 573 Fall 2008 70% ± 10% 50% 473 Spring 2009 69% ± 13% 43% 473 Spring 2010 72% ± 12% 47%