English 193
TA: Patrick Mooney
Winter 2014
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 section guidelines handout:
- Attendance and participation in section and in a research/writing group (10% of course grade).
- Detection structure assignment, due in section on 21 or 22 January (5% of course grade).
- One paper of 3-5 pages, due at the beginning of lecture on Thursday, 6 February (20% of course grade).
- A final research research paper of 5-7 pages, or a crime or detective story of 5-15 pages, due at noon on Friday, 21 March (30% of course grade).
- Three quizzes on dates to be announced (15% of course grade total).
- A final exam from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday, 20 March (30% of course grade).
- All of the above course assignments must be completed, and at least six discussion sections must be attended, in order to receive a passing grade for the course.
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 75 points, the final exam will be worth 150 points, the first paper will be worth 100 points, the second paper will be worth 150 points, section/WRG attendance and participation will be worth 50 points, and the detection structure assignment will be worth 25 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. Although Professor Newfield and 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).
There will be a total of three quizzes during the quarter, and they will be worth a total of fifteen percent of your final grade for the quarter. The relative value of quizzes has not been announced (to me or to you) in advance, but will be based on the total number of correct answers on each quiz. The total number of correct relative points will be scaled so that it is worth 15% of your final grade for the quarter (75 points total out of 500 for the quarter).
According to Professor Newfield’s expressed wishes, you lose points for not coming up with the correct answer, but not for providing additional answers that are incorrect. This is the way that quiz one has been graded (this is the only quiz that has been given at the time this document was written). This will continue to be the case for upcoming quizzes as well, provided that no one selects so many incorrect answers as to raise a suspicion that they are trying to game the grading system. If this becomes the case, I will begin to penalize incorrect answers.
To provide some specific numbers for the sake of concretizing this explanation: Quiz was worth twelve "raw" points. If quiz two is worth ten points, and quiz three is worth eight points, then there will thirty total " raw points" during the quarter, and each of these points will wind up being worth ½% of your total grade for the term, or 2½ out of your 500 total points for the quarter.
Early reporting caveat: Because the relative value of quizzes has not been announced in advance, it is impossible for me to provide a completely accurate estimate of your grade in this regard. For this reason, any time I quote you a "current grade" before quiz three has been graded scales the points in such a way that it assumes that the quizzes that have not yet been graded get the same percentage score as the quizzes that have been graded.
Section attendance and participation are worth 50 total points (10% of the total grade for the quarter). Before going into details, it is worthwhile to say up front that you do not automatically receive points for attending — there are no seat-filling points. Someone who attends every section but never speaks doesn't receive any attendance/participation points. (In practice, though, the student who never speaks is so rare as to border on nonexistence.) Make sure you understand the implications of the formula at the end of this section.
I track your absences from each section and total how many sections you missed. If you miss more than four sections, you automatically receive a non-passing grade for the course. Recall from the section guidelines handout that I do not distinguish between excused
and unexcused
absences — if you are not present and not contributing to the group's discourse, then you do not receive any points for the week, regardless of the reason why you missed section. For this reason, it's a good idea not to miss section unless you absolutely have to — or at least unless the reason why you're missing section is important enough to you that it's worth it to you to lose points for not being there.
In addition to tracking attendance, I also assign a relative, competitive weighting factor, a fraction between zero and one, to everyone's participation over the course of the quarter. A weighting factor of zero means that you made no meaningful contributions at all to the group's discourse during the term (very unlikely). A weighting factor of one means that you made constant insightful, meaningful contributions to the group's discussion that involved not only merely speaking, but regularly advancing the group's understanding of topics under discussion (quite uncommon, but several students will receive this weighting score). An average weighting for students in the course will likely be about 0.8.
It might be worth emphasizing that your relative weighting involves making more productive contributions to the class's discussion than other people, and that you are competing for this relative weighting not only against your own section, but against my other sections for the quarter.
If it just so happens that no group work is scheduled for section during a particular week, then I may be amenable to you attending another TA's section instead of your regular section. If you will be missing work with your WRG, however, you will not be able to receive credit for attending another TA's section, because your absence will deprive the rest of your group of the opportunity to receive your input and benefit from your perspective during that week. Note that I may not know until tuesday afternoon if work with your WRG is scheduled (this is when Professor Newfield usually meets with his TAs). In general, you should not assume that you can receive credit for attending another TA's section.
If you would like to receive credit for attending another TA's section during a particular week, you must meet all of the following requirements:
All of that being said, your attendance/participation score is calculated according to this formula:
(total number of sections attended) * (relative weighting) * 5
Early reporting caveat: I do not assign the weighting factor until the end of the quarter, so if you have not been speaking regularly so far, it's not too late to leave me with a good impression. Because I do not assign the weighting factor until the end of the quarter, any "your grade at this point" estimate that I send you during the quarter substitutes an estimate based on attendance for your attendance/participation score.
This assignment is worth 25 points (5% of your total grade for the quarter) and is graded on a check, check-plus, or check-minus basis. A check on your assignment means that you have performed adequately and receive full credit (25 points). People who performed far above expectations received a check-plus, worth 30 points (a small bonus of 1% of the total grade for the term). People whose assignment was inadequate in some fundamental way received a check-minus, worth 20 points.
Letter grades for papers are assigned based on my grading rubric for analytical papers or my grading rubric for fiction, whichever is appropriate for the individual assignment, 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 the entire weekend as a single day.
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 too wide, 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, after all, attempts to be 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 without penalties is worth the same number of points as every other A- paper without penalties, every B paper without penalties is worth the same number of points as every other B paper without penalties, and so forth.
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 (before penalties, anyway). If you do something that warrants an F on a paper, you get zero points for that assignment (and, if the F is caused by plagiarism, 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: 100 points (20% of your quarter grade) for the first paper, and 150 points (30% 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% | 100 | 150 |
| A | 95% | 95 | 142.5 |
| A- | 91.5% | 91.5 | 137.5 |
| B+ | 88.5% | 88.5 | 132.75 |
| B | 85% | 85 | 127.5 |
| B- | 81.5% | 81.5 | 122.25 |
| C+ | 78.5% | 78.5 | 117.75 |
| C | 75% | 75 | 112.5 |
| C- | 71.5% | 71.5 | 107.25 |
| D | 65% | 65 | 97.5 |
| 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 100 for the first paper or 150 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 of you 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.)
If the final exam is not nominally worth 100 points, it will be scaled to 100 points (20% of your course grade) for purposes of this calculation.
I add the points for your quizzes, after scaling them, to the point totals for your final exam, section/WRG attendance and participation, detection structure assignment, 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" — you either cross them or you don't. I do not round your score, nor do I consider 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!