Dear students,
I am releasing the “raw” grades on Crowdmark now. We have finalized the midterm grading yesterday night. These grades will be curved slightly before being released to Quercus: I will probably do a cut-off (90-100 ⇒ 100; 0-90 ⇒ 0-100). I will release the commented solutions later today or tomorrow.
Some very important comments:
- Please review your midterm: this is one of the best ways to reinforce your learning. The reflection posted today is meant to be filled while reviewing your midterm result. It is weighted as 2 points (instead of the usual 1), and is due next Sunday. Discuss your solutions, mistakes, inaccuracies, vent about the grade :)
- Grading was very harsh for top solutions: this is mainly intended for you to see some feedback even if you achieved a near perfect submission. Actually, no student received a perfect 100% on pre-curve grades. Please do consider these to be a source of feedback, and not necessarily a score indicating your complete actual understanding of the course: the goal is for the post-curve, post-regrade mark to be reflective of that. This is why I decided to curve cut-off style for the moment: students who lost just a few points usually lost them because of slight inaccuracies or ambiguities, and not critical mistakes.
- Grading was reasonably generous for partial solutions: correct ideas and good notation use was compensated. However, correct answers with no explanations were not awarded significant score if any.
- I will share the entire statistics: both before curves and regrades and after.
- Office hours on Thursday Feb 27th (11 am - 1 pm, UC 51 and UC 55) will completely be dedicated to addressing questions on your midterm submissions.
- I expect a high volume of regrade requests (and I encourage them!): the volume of the grading was high, and mistakes on our side are unavoidable. Requests like “I believe I earned more points on this problem than I have”, “this was a typo” are all valid. Regrades are not considered by me as “students are bargaining for a better grade”, but as a way to smooth out the miscommunication that unavoidably happens in grading written assignments (due to different graders, having to use a somewhat rigid rubric, and a “blind eye” due to the volume of similar work assessed).
- If you have got a score below 35%, I encourage you to book a one-on-one meeting with me to discuss the reasons behind your result.
- You are allowed and encouraged to share (parts of) your graded midterms in Piazza to ask for feedback on the grade.
**Regrade requests can be submitted until the end of next week (March 2nd 11:59 pm). This deadline is strict. The regrade request has to be sent before the deadline, but could be assessed after it. Follow-ups on the same request are admissible after the deadline (within reason). **
How to submit a regrade request?
Regrade requests should be only submitted through Piazza using the “midterm1/regrade_request” tag or in person during office hours or one-on-one meetings. Post using the “Question” post type, and post to “Individual Student(s)/Instructor(s)” (select “Instructors”). The reason for this is the following: e-mails get lost very quickly, especially follow-ups. In Piazza, I will immediately see which regrade requests have been finalized. Moreover, you can follow-up easily on your request and check “Unresolved” so that I can see that a request needs my attention again.
Here is the current score distribution:
Here is the post-curve post-regrade score distribution:
