English 192
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Summer 2013
This document is an explanation of how your overall grade is calculated for the quarter. This is, after all, your education; and your grade, though perhaps incidental to the real purposes of education, is, after all, very important to you for a variety of (mostly good, I think) reasons. Because of this, I believe it's worthwhile to show my hand in this matter, so you can understand exactly how your final grade is calculated.
It is always perfectly OK to e-mail me and ask what your grade is. I use a spreadsheet to perform these calculations, and I keep it up-to-date, so it is almost no work for me to answer an e-mail asking what your grade is. It is your grade, based on your work, and I believe strongly that you should have the option of knowing what your current grade is at any time.
Recall the following details about the relative value of the course components from the course syllabus:
- Intermittent reading/film quizzes: 20% of final grade. Reading quizzes occur at the beginning of lecture and, if missed, cannot be made up. I will drop your two lowest quiz scores from inclusion in your final grade.
- Final exam: 20% of final grade.
- One three- to five-page paper: 25% of final grade.
- One five- to seven-page paper: 35% of final grade.
- All course assignments must be completed, and at least five reading quizzes must be taken, in order to receive a grade above C- for the course.
- Extra credit (up to 4%) is available for those interested making a (15- to 20-minute) presentation of an in-depth reading of a specific aspect of a text, or of a specific theoretical perspective that is relevant to the course concerns.
This quarter, I am performing grade calculations in such a way that there will be 500 total points for the term. That is to say, more specifically, that the quizzes will total 100 points, the final will be worth 100 points, the first paper will be worth 125 points, and the second paper will be worth 175 points. Extra credit, if you take it, is worth up to 20 points.
I do not "curve" grades. In the past, the average (i.e., mean) grade I gave for all students during the quarter has always been very close to 85% (a middle B). This is not the result of curving grades, but rather of the way that I define what each grade is worth.
The University of California does not provide a formal definition of how percentages or point totals should map onto letter grades, preferring to leave that determination to individual instructors. However, there is a default mapping on GauchoSpace for instructors who use GauchoSpace to calculate grades and do not override this mapping. Though I do not use GauchoSpace to calculate grades, I find that this set of numbers is in line with general academic practice, and have decided to adopt it (with the small modification that I have defined an A+ grade in a way consistent with the rest of the grade definitions — GauchoSpace does not include a definition for A+).
My mapping from percentages to letter grades is as follows:
| If your (percentage) grade for the quarter is at least… | but less than … | then your letter grade is… |
|---|---|---|
| 97% | — | A+ |
| 93% | 97% | A |
| 90% | 93% | A- |
| 87% | 90% | B+ |
| 83% | 87% | B |
| 80% | 83% | B- |
| 77% | 80% | C+ |
| 73% | 77% | C |
| 70% | 73% | C- |
| 67% | 70% | D+ |
| 63% | 67% | D |
| 60% | 63% | D- |
| — | 60% | F |
This set of mappings is the basis for both your paper grades (discussed in more detail below) and your final grade for the quarter (also discussed in more detail below).
Quizzes have a base worth worth of 10 points each (though there are extra credit possibilities on most quizzes), and the lowest two quiz scores will be dropped from inclusion in your final grade. I have not decided how many total quizzes will occur during the quarter, so I will scale the point total from your highest quizzes to 100 total points. That is to say: if there are n quizzes, then I will map your highest n-2 quizzes onto 100 points by giving each quiz equal weight.
To be more explicit: There will be approximately ten to twelve quizzes over the quarter. Let us assume, for purposes of producing specific numbers in this example, that there will be exactly ten quizzes. If each of these quizzes is worth ten points, then your eight highest quiz scores will be worth a possible total of eighty points. If this winds up being the case, then I will add the points from your eight highest quizzes and multiply this total by 1.25 (10⁄8) to produce a scaled quiz total out of 100 points. Similarly, if there are eleven quizzes, then I will total your nine highest quiz scores and multiply by 10⁄9 to produce a scaled total out of 100 possible points. In any case, the ostensible total possible points will equal 100 (though some students may get more than 100 points for their quiz total by both performing very well and picking up bonus points throughout the quarter).
Letter grades for papers are assigned based on my grading rubric, possibly modified by up to two penalties. The first of these penalties is for late papers; the second is for not meeting the bare minimum length requirement for papers (three full pages for the first paper, five full pages for the second paper, not including the Works Cited page). Late papers are penalized by one-third of a letter grade for each day that the paper is late, counting both Saturday and Sunday as a single day. (If a Friday or Monday that is a holiday resulting in campus closure is part of the time period during which your paper is late, then I will count that as part of the single-day weekend, as well.)
The penalty for not hitting the bare minimum length for a paper — even if you're only short by one line — is four-thirds of a letter grade. You can also incur this same penalty by writing a paper that appears to meet or slightly exceed the bare minimum paper length, but reaches this length by tweaking the format for the paper in such a way that it looks to me as if you would not have reached the minimum length if the paper had been properly formatted (for instance, if you just exactly fill three pages for your first paper, but your margins are wider than one inch, then you have, effectively, not met the minimum length requirement, and will incur the penalty). If you get this penalty on paper one, you can remove it by writing at least six full pages on paper two. If you get this penalty on paper two, there is no way to remove it, so make absolutely sure that paper two is long enough.
You will notice, regarding the penalty calculation, that I say that the penalty for a late paper is one-third of a letter grade
per day, not that it bumps you down to the next lower grade range. One letter grade being worth 10%, what this actually means is that each day that your paper is late reduces your score by 3⅓%. Because the middle range (neither plus nor minus) is slightly larger than the top and bottom ranges (plus and minus) for each letter range, this means that, in practice, a B that you get by turning in a B+ paper one day late is worth slightly more than a B paper turned in on time, whereas a B- that you get by turning in a B paper one day late is slightly lower than a B- paper turned in on time. In practice, I have never yet had a student whose final grade for the quarter was affected by this calculation detail (but this document is, after all, an exhaustive declaration of how your grade is calculated). You will also have noticed that I assign letter grades to papers, and then map those letter grades onto point totals. To put it another way: every A- paper is worth the same number of points as every other A- paper, every B paper is worth the same number of points as every other B paper, and so on.
With two exceptions (the very rare A+ and F grades, discussed in a moment), points assigned for each paper grade are the number of points in the middle of that grade range — not the high end, and not the low end. That is, an A- paper gets not 90% (the low end of the A- scale), nor 93% (the high end of the A- scale), but the middle — 91.5%.
In the unusual event that someone writes an A+ paper, this is worth 100%, not 98.5% (which would be the middle of the A+ range). You will note from my grading rubric that I set the bar for A+ papers very high, and I believe that anyone writing one of these papers should be rewarded with the maximum possible number of points for that assignment.
If your paper has problems large enough to land it in the D range, I do not assign a plus or minus to it — all D grades are simply D's. If you do something that warrants an F on a paper, you get zero points for that assignment (and may have done something that will result in further disciplinary action).
After your letter grade is mapped onto a percentage, this percentage is then used to calculate a point total, based on the total possible points for the assignment: 125 points (25% of your quarter grade) for the first paper, and 175 points (35% of your quarter grade) for the second paper.
Given all of this, here is the point value of each letter grade, assuming there are no penalties:
| Letter Grade | Percentage | Point total on 1st paper | Point total on 2nd paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| A+ | 100% | 125 | 175 |
| A | 95% | 118.75 | 166.25 |
| A- | 91.5% | 114.375 | 160.125 |
| B+ | 88.5% | 110.625 | 154.875 |
| B | 85% | 106.25 | 148.75 |
| B- | 81.5% | 101.875 | 142.625 |
| C+ | 78.5% | 98.125 | 137.375 |
| C | 75% | 93.75 | 137.375 |
| C- | 71.5% | 89.375 | 125.125 |
| D | 65% | 81.25 | 113.75 |
| F | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The formula used to calculate total points for papers which do incur penalties is:
[(percentage score for base grade) - (days late * 10⁄3) - (length penalty of 40⁄3, if applicable)] * (maximum points possible⁄100),
in which percentage score for base grade
is the value from the column labeled percentage
above and maximum points possible
is 125 for the first paper or 175 for the second paper. Note that I count the entire weekend as one day: although you have two days (three, on holiday weekends) to make progress on your work, you are unable to turn your work in because South Hall is locked on weekends. I consider calling the entire weekend one day
a reasonable compromise.
(Those who are mathematically inclined may notice that the formula above is actually the formula by which all grades are calculated, including those which incur no penalties.)
The final exam will be worth exactly 100 points. No scaling will be necessary.
Students who opt to do the extra credit assignment will receive up to 20 points added on to their total score for the quarter. Although the criteria for evaluation are somewhat different than the criteria for paper-grading, my grading rubric provides a general guide to the level of excellence expected for each letter grade. Please see me if you have any questions about grading criteria for the extra credit assignment.
Extra credit presentations must be topically related to a text that we are currently discussing, or have discussed within the last week, or to something that is a fundamental, recurring theme throughout the course. To provide the most extreme example: the final week of instruction is too late to present an in-depth examination of some part of Alien for extra credit.
A caveat: Extra credit cannot lift your total grade for the quarter into the A+ range. Any A+ that I give as a final grade is a "natural" A+, denoting excellent work throughout the entire quarter.
I add the points for your quizzes, after scaling them and dropping your lowest two scores, to the point totals for your final exam and both papers, add in points for any extra credit presentation you may have made, and assign a final letter grade for the quarter based on the following table:
| If your point total is at least… | but less than … | then your letter grade is… |
|---|---|---|
| 485 | — | A+ |
| 465 | 485 | A |
| 450 | 465 | A- |
| 435 | 450 | B+ |
| 415 | 435 | B |
| 400 | 415 | B- |
| 385 | 400 | C+ |
| 365 | 385 | C |
| 350 | 365 | C- |
| 335 | 350 | D+ |
| 315 | 335 | D |
| 300 | 315 | D- |
| — | 300 | F |
The point totals above are "bright lines" — you either cross them or you don't. I do not consider getting close to be "good enough." If you have a point total for the quarter of 364.8, for instance, you have a C-, not a C (and have therefore almost certainly not satisfied any breadth requirements that you were trying to satisfy by taking the course).
Please let me know if you have any questions about these calculations!