Comments on grades
Hello everyone-
Since I've received a lot of inquiries regarding final grades, I just thought I'd make a few comments here- Hopefully these comments are still in some of your RSS feeds and you'll see these comments.
I am not going to post the exact cutoffs between A/B/C/D/F- suffice it to say that they are lower than the 90/80/70... cutoffs I posted on the syllabus (that's to your advantage). You have enough information to determine your final score given the information in e-gradebook.
The average grade (~74) and the median grade (~75) fell squarely in the 'C' range, where they should.
I try very hard to be absolutely fair about how grades are determined- with the exception of determining the cutoffs (over which I retain a small amount of discretion), determination of grades is entirely objective and follows the weighting scheme laid out in the syllabus. Indeed somebody in the class got the highest B+ and missed an A- by a fraction of a point; at the same time somebody got the lowest A- and missed getting a B+ by a fraction of a point. This is one of the unavoidable consequences of discretized grading schemes.
jay-