Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Final grades

I've just posted your final grades on myBama, and I just updated the gradebook on Blackboard to include your final exam scores and overall averages. Have a look.

The final exam average was about 80%. For the problems portion you averaged 78.9%, and for the multiple choice you averaged 79.5% after scaling. The problems section went well, and there was no scaling. The multiple choice section went ... less well. The raw average was in the 60% range, so I scaled it by taking your best 9 out of 12 multiple choice questions and adding 7% (with a maximum of 107% on this section). The average of the multiple choice and problems sections then determined your final exam grade, and the class average was about 79.2% for the final exam as a whole, with a standard deviation of 13%.

Quite a few people changed grades (like B+ to A- and vice versa) as a result of the final. Many went up, many went down. On average, your final exam grades were about 2% lower than your average going into the final. Not many of you changed by more than half a letter grade, but some of you did. Those are the breaks, and I really hate doing it. Assigning final grades is agonizing, even when it is basically just by-the-numbers, and even after all the scores are in and the grades calculated it takes me hours to pull the trigger and submit grades.

In the end, the overall class average was 85.5% with a standard deviation of 8.65%, which is quite high. Most of you got A's and B's, and I'm fine with that.

I know some of you will be oddly surprised by a higher-than-expected grade, but a good number of you will also be annoyed by a lower-than-expected grade. Look at your final exam scores and overall grade breakdown on BlackBoard, and keep in mind that the final exam was worth quite a bit (so it was possible to change your grade by a fair amount).

If things don't seem to add up, or you have questions, let me know ASAP - we have just under 24 hours to easily alter things before the deadline if a mistake is found. 

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