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 adjusted course average (ACA).
Course work is weighted as follows:
- 5% for iclicker questions.
- 5% for online quizzes,
- 15% for homework,
- 20% for each midterm,
- 35% for the final exam.
- In rare cases a few students performing exceptionally
better than all the other students in a class *might* get an
A+. Since A+ is equal to an A as far as GPA in the University of
Illinois, this has no impact on GPA. The only guaranteed way for
getting an A+ is to get a perfect score on all exams, homeworks and
quizzes.
- Grads and undergrads are graded on different scales.
- Getting an F:
- Failing to attend 70% of the lectures.
- Failing to attend 70% of the discussion sections.
- Failing to answer correct or incorrectly 70% of the iclicker
questions.
- Undergrads - Anyone with a homework average below 40% or a
ACA below 30%, automatically gets an F. (You can fail in
other ways too, see below.)
- Graduate students - Any student with a homework average
below 50% or an ACA below 40%, automatically gets an F.
- Any student with an exam average <= 25%.
This are not the only ways to fail this class.
- Compute basic statistics of the distribution of the ACA. This
would be done separately for grad and undergrad students.
- Determine letter grade cutoffs, excluding extreme outliers
at both ends of the curve.
- For undergrads - 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. That is, the
range that corresponds to the grade B itself has length of 1/3 of
a stadnard deviation.
- For graduate students - the mean is a borderline A-/B+, and each
standard deviation is half a letter grade.
- The above is just a guideline - the thresholds would be
manipulated as the instructor see fit (within reason).
- Compute final letter grades from ACAs, except for the
outliers from previous steps.
- Adjust grades (only upwards!) as the instructor sees fit.
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. Extra credit points would be scaled
appropriately before being added to the ACA (the exact scaling factor
would be somewhere in the range between 0.01 and 1).