Exam- & Grade-related items

First: I am dropping quiz 4. This is for your own good :-) It will not be entered in the grade book, but it did give you a preview of 4 of the 25 exam questions. The average was going to be such that most of you would have ended up dropping it anyway. More generally, this is why I dislike multiple-choice quizzes, and should stop giving them: with four questions, if one trips up most of you, the average is already going to be below 75% at best. I made them multiple choice this time just so they would be identical to the exam questions.

Anyway: the quiz served its purpose in my mind - you really nailed those four questions on the exam.

Second: the exam is graded, and your grades are on eLearning. There is also a new column which lists your current overall average grade. This does not include any dropped grades, and thus you may consider it a worst-case scenario at the moment.

Here are some more details on the exam grades:

The average was 75.3, standard deviation 13.5. This basically means it was not necessary to scale it, and it went better than you think (mostly). Here are a couple of histograms. The first is coarsely-binned at 10 points (roughly corresponding to A, B, C, etc), the second is more finely-grained at 4% increments (corresponding to +/- 1 question). (Click on pics for larger versions.) Looking at your average score per question is - for me anyway - far more insightful. This tells me which stuff I need to review a bit more before we get to the final.


We'll go over all the questions which averaged less than 70% or so in Friday's class.

Third: it is still far too early to freak out about grades. If you have been completing most of the homework and quizzes you are not in any trouble yet. Conversely: if you haven't done any homework ... now would be an awesome time to start. The average course grade right now is 85.4, a solid B.

Quizzes, homework, and labs will shore up one bad exam easily. Here are the class averages for various components:

Lab - 94.6
Quiz - 83.5
HW - 90.0
Exam 1 - 73.6

Clearly, the best plan is to do the homework and show up for the labs ... apparently these points are easier to get.

Fourth: Check your grades carefully to make sure nothing is missing. Sometimes, I forget to upload a homework score, etc.