CS 473: Grading Policies

Graded homework and exams
Regrade requests
Final course grades

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 exams from the TA office during office hours. Under normal circumstances, your graded work should be ready to pick up at most 20 working days after you submit it.
We will post homework and exam grades on your moodle account. 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 (only for the midterms) soon after the exam ends.

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 (i.e., printed) 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.
For a homework regrade request - you have to submit the regrade request on paper - this can not be handled electronically. You have to submit a printed copy of your homework together with a printed justification for your regrade request. Handling the regrade request might take up to two weeks.
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.

The following is a sketch of the algorithm how the final grade is going to be computed. The instructor reserves the right to fiddle with it before computing the final grades if necessary (but judging by previous semesters no changes would be necessary).

We will determine final course grades as follows.
1. 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.
2. Compute everyone's adjusted course average (ACA). Course work is weighted as follows:
  - 6% for online quizzes,
  - 22% for homework,
  - 42% (2 x 21%) for midterm exams.
  - 30% for the final exam (covers full course content).
3. A+ is reserved for exceptional performance as judged by the instructor.
4. Grads and undergrads are graded on different scales.
5. Getting an F:
  - 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.
6. Compute basic statistics of the distribution of the ACA. This would be done separately for grad and undergrad students.
7. 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 standard deviation.
  - For graduate students - the mean is a borderline A-/B+, and each standard deviation is half a letter grade.
  - The above is a guideline - the thresholds will be adjusted by the instructor within reason.
8. Compute final letter grades from ACAs, except for the outliers from previous steps.
9. 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).
Over the last few semesters the mean for undergrads of the ACA is between 65% and 70% and the minimum passing score is about 45%.

Justification of grading undergrads and graduates separately: Graduate students tend to do considerably better in this class than undergrads. As such, grading the two separate groups on the same curve would have the effect of crowding out undergrads from getting an A or an A-. In addition, the work required of graduate student might be different, as they might be required to do extra homework problems (or extra homeworks) and extra problems on exams. Notice, that the grading policy described above (or something very similar to it) was used in the past when significant number of graduate students took this class.

CS 473: Grading Policies

Graded homeworks and exams

Regrade requests

Final course grades