Grading Policy

There are two components to your raw total:

• Homeworks: 25%
  • Remember we have a drop policy so if you miss a homework due to illness or did not perform as well as you’d hoped, you have an opportunity to bounce back.
  • Specifically, we will include only the top 27 homework problems (including the lab problems) scores in computing your final grade. We expect to grade 9 homeworks, each with 4 problems. Should for some reason we would grade less homework problems, we will still use the top 27 homework problems.
  • If you submit everything, this policy is equivalent to dropping 9 homework problems.
  • If you submit less than 20 homework problems you are likely to fail unless there is an overriding excuse.
• Exams: 75%
  • There will be three midterm exams, and a cumulative final exam.
  • We will drop the lowest exam grade (including the final). Hence, each exam is worth 25% but if you screw one up, never fear, one exam will get dropped. Alternatively, if you do well on the midterms and want to skip the final, go for it! We will try our best to give students a projected final grade after the third midterm.
  • Keep in mind that regardless of the exam you drop, you will still be tested on the entire course content since the final is cumulative.
  • I will use a flat curve to make all the exam averages to be approximately 70 points. Thus it should be beneficial to drop one exam over another. Because most students elect not to take the final, the final average will be calculated to be on par with the takers’ past, post-curve exam averages. This is because most top-performing students skip the final, so we want to ensure the difficulty is on par with past exams.
  • There will be no conflicts. The drop policy is specifically for individuals who need a bit of a break for whatever reason (illness, duty, etc.).
  • I don’t want to be the arbiter of what is and isn’t a valid reason to miss your work (and neither should students have to plead and hope for mercy from professors). That is why I constructed this policy, which is merciful but will be applied strictly. If you have a serious issue that causes you to miss two or more midterms, you ned to contact your department’s advising office and/or the emergency dean.
  • I firmly believe that an exam grade distribution with a mean of 50 is best because it allows me to maximize the standard deviation on both ends. This is important to me since tests with a large uniform distribution allow test takers to make a few mistakes without altering their final grade too much.
  • The above being said, I have made an effort to increase the average of my exams to ~70 to be more in line with typical American standards (though I still refuse to give trivial problems just for the sake of increasing the average so some exams may have lower averages). I’m doing this simply because there is a minority of students who vehemently believe all tests should have an average of at least 70 and don’t even pay attention to standard deviation. They are wrong, and in the past two semesters where the exam averages were higher, final grade cutoffs were significantly smaller which meant a lot of people missed a letter grade because of a missed exam problem. That sucks. But this minority of students that committed to this idea of high averages is aggressively vocal (especially online) and those that understand the policy and its benefits don’t speak up. I’m not here to be a martyr so if you do agree with me about the larger distribution, please speak up. Email the department admins, contact your student organizations, etc. But I have fought long and hard to change this course for (in my opinion) the better and have been thoroughly shut down. I can’t do it anymore.

Final grade calculation

Here is the thing, no one use the standard cutoff calculation. All professors grade relatively. Yes, even the ones that say they don’t. Those professors that say they have a firm, preset grading cutoff are usually older and have banks of questions that they have tested over the course of decades, so they know the performance distribution of any particular question ahead of time.

I can’t do this since I try to constantly find and develop new problems and hence, I’m never really sure how hard the students will find these new problems. So while I won’t give anyone a grade less than the distribution above dictates, I will use an additional relative grading scheme layer where the cutoffs are determined such that the percentage of students getting each letter grades is approximately:

A's	B's	C's	D's and F's
30%	35%	25%	10%

Usually I would do this at the end of the semester once I have the grade distribution in hand. However, this has slowly caused a weird psychology among some students. During the semester some students would be worried because they weren’t quite sure what their final grade would be and others would be totally relaxed even though they had scored many deviations below the mean on their exams because they were counting on the curve at the end. The situation has become toxic.

But here’s the good news. I’ve taught this course enough times so that I have a pretty good idea of the final grade distribution. So I am going to simply assign the cutoffs now. As long as nothing insane happens (like 10% of the course getting A’s or >10% course getting F’s), this will be the cutoffs I’m sticking to in the end. Keep in mind, I am still flat curving all the exams to at least 70.

A+	A	A-	B+	B	B-	C+	C	C-	D+	D	D-	F
96 94	88 86	82 80	75 73	70 68	67 65	64 62	60 58	57 55	54 52	50 48	47 45	0

I assigned these cutoffs after an analysis of historical grades. Big thing to note is that historically, the vast majority >80% of students end with a homework average >90%. This means that with a mean exam of 70% and a homework average >90% you are guaranteed a B+ which seems fair.

Before anyone says, “what if everyone does really well?” keep in mind that I never curve down exams, only up if the average is below 70%. This means that it is still perfectly possible for the class average to be way higher than 75%. Personally I’m hoping you guys surprise me this semester and the majority of the class falls in the A+ category. I guess we’ll see.

This typically puts the average GPA of my course right around ~3.1 ish which is mostly in-line with what I see in the rest of the ECE department. I’m not promising an exact average, could be a bit lower, could be higher, but that’s the rough target.

Important notes:

• Grade cutoffs change for every semester simply because the exam/homework grade distributions change every semester.
• I will not change the cutoffs for any individual student. If you have a special circumstance that you feel needs to be taken into account, please contact your department’s advising office.

Regrade requests

All regrade requests would be handled via Gradescope. Regrade requests can be submitted at most a week after the grades are posted on Gradescope.

• Make sure the Canvas Gradebook is correct. The only reason why I’m keeping Canvas around is because I want to be open about the grades I have recorded so you guys can keep me honest and point out anything that seems amiss.
• Please check that your grades are tabulated and recorded correctly. If you notice a mistake, please use Gradescope to ask for a regrade. Regrade period for homeworks/exams is one week after the grade is available.
• If you do not understand your grade on a homework or exam problem, please discuss your grade with one of the instructors or TAs during office hours. After that discussion, if you still believe that your work has been graded incorrectly, please request a regrade.
• Late regrade requests will be ignored. Homework and exam regrades can be requested within Gradescope.
• All regrade requests must include a written succinct justification for the request. Good justifications include the following:
  • My answer agrees with the posted solution, but I still lost points.
  • You took off points for missing the base case, but it’s right here (right here!).
  • My answer is correct, even though it does not match the posted solution. (This happens more frequently if your answer is not even remotely similar to the “standard” solution.)
  • The official solution is incorrect; here’s a counterexample.

  Regrade requests with poor or missing justifications will be denied.

• You will lose all points on a question if you waste our time by submitting repeatedly unjustified regrade requests.
• We can only grade what you actually submitted. You cannot get a higher grade by explaining what you meant, either in person or in writing; your original submission must stand on its own.
• If you submit a regrade request, we will regrade the submitted problem from scratch. Your grade may go down.
• We will readily admit, apologize for, and correct our mistakes if you have been graded unfairly. However, please remember that “unfairly” means your grade is inconsistent with the published grading rubric, or that you were graded more harshly than other students, not just that you think the rubric itself is too harsh. Please also keep in mind that each homework point is worth approximately 0.1% of your final course grade. Don’t fight for each point like your life depends on it - it does not!
• You would lose points (and potentially all of them) for long and tedious solutions.

Extra Credit

Extra credit (which is given completely in the discretion of the instructors) would be given in exceptional cases for the following:

• Being in the top few participants on piazza. (As long as most of your answers are useful and correct [and add to the current discussion {i.e., don’t repost others answers just to increase your count}] - a campaign of disinformation on piazza would gain you little.)
• Taking on small, interesting problem/research challenges I may post to the website.
• Extra credit is only given to people that have completed significantly more work than is required for this course. Significant means tens of hours of solid work/effort.