English 104A
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney, M.A.
Spring 2012
This document is an explanation of how your overall grade is calculated for the quarter. As this is, after all, your education, and as your grade, though incidental to the real purposes of education, is, after all, very important to you for a variety of (mostly good) reasons, I think it's worthwhile to show my hand in this matter, so you can understand 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 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, Monday, June 11, 4-7 p.m.: 30% of final grade.
- One four- to six-page paper, due on May 2: 25% of final grade.
- One four- to six-page paper, due on June 6: 25% 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 D+ for the course.
This quarter, I am performing all grade calculations in such a way that there will be 500 total points for the quarter. That is to say, more specifically, that the quizzes will total 100 points, the final will be worth 150 points, and each paper will be worth 125 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.
UCSB 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 mapping 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 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 point mappings is the basis for both your paper grades (discussed in more detail below) and your final grade for the quarter.
Quizzes have a base worth worth of 10 points each (though some have extra credit possibilities), 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 about ten 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 eighty points. If this winds up being the case, then I will multiply your total points for your eight highest quizzes by 1.25 (10⁄8) to produce a scaled quiz total out of 100 points. If there are more or fewer quizzes, then I will scale them in a similar way to ensure that the ostensible total possible points equals 100.
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 hitting the bare minimum length for papers (four full pages, 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. The penalty for not hitting the bare minimum length for a paper is four-thirds of a letter grade.
You will notice, regarding penalty calculations, 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, not point totals, 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 (and this is also true for other letter grades).
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%. Your paper is worth 125 points, not 100, so your point total for a paper is your percentage score multiplied by 1.25.
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 have probably done something that will result in further disciplinary action).
Given all of this, here is the point value of each letter grade, assuming there are no penalties:
| Letter Grade | Percentage | Point total |
|---|---|---|
| A+ | 100 | 125 |
| A | 95 | 118.75 |
| A- | 91.5 | 114.375 |
| B+ | 88.5 | 110.625 |
| B | 85 | 106.25 |
| B- | 81.5 | 101.875 |
| C+ | 78.5 | 98.125 |
| C | 75 | 93.75 |
| C- | 71.5 | 89.375 |
| D | 65 | 81.25 |
| F | 0 | 0 |
The final exam will be worth exactly 150 points. No scaling will be necessary.
There are three sections on the final exam:
A series of sample final questions, and sample answers, are available here.
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, 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 that you either cross 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, you have a C-, not a C.
Please let me know if you have any questions about these calculations!