GEOSC 10
Geology of the National Parks

How To Calculate Your Grade

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Your grade to date is visible to you in the course gradebook but for those of you that just love math, we have provided the details below.

Your final grade is based on the following categories

  • Final Exam: 20%
  • Ten highest RockOn Quizzes, 4.5% each, total 45%
  • Ten highest Students-Speak Surveys, 1% each, total 10%
  • Five highest exercises, 5% each, total 25%

To calculate, think of your score for the whole class as adding up to 100 points (20 for the final exam plus 45 for RockOns plus 10 for Students-Speak plus 25 for exercises equals 100). You can earn 10 of those points by taking 10 Students-Speaks (or by taking 11 or 12; 10 points maximum), but you get only 9 points if you complete only 9, and you get only 8 points if you complete only 8, and so on.

You can earn up to 4.5 points for each of your 10 highest RockOns, for a total of 45. If you earn 100% on a particular RockOn, you get 4.5 points from that quiz towards your end-of-class. If you earn a 75% of the answers right on a particular RockOn you will get 3.375 points in your end-of-class grade. Getting 90% of the answers right on a particular RockOn gives you 4.05 points in your end-of-class grade (divide the 90 earned by 100 to convert from percentages to decimal, then multiply the result, which is 0.9, by the 4.5 points that the quiz is worth to find 4.05 points).

You can earn up to 5 points in your end-of-class grade for each of your 5 highest exercises. If you earn 100% of the available points on an exercise, you get 5 points in your end-of-class grade (if you earn 100% each on all 6 exercises, you get the points from only 5 of them). If you earn 80% of the available points on an exercise that you do not drop, you get 4 points for your end-of-class grade (divide the 80 earned by 100 and multiply the result, which is 0.8, by the 5 points available on the exercise).

The last 20 points you can earn are from the final exam.

So, add up the points from the Students-Speak (up to 10), from the RockOns (up to 4.5 points for each of 10, or 45 total), from the Exercises (up to 5 points for each of 5, or 25 total) and from the final exam (up to 20), and you get a number that may be as high as 100, or lower. Add in any extra credit (up to 6 points, so your maximum is now 106). Then, we grade “straight-scale” as listed in the syllabus (93 or above is A, and so on). And, if that leaves the grades looking too low, we curve to raise the grades; however, if the grades are really high, you get them anyway. If you want to know how you’re doing now, you can very easily guess what you’ll get on the rest of the exercises, RockOns, Students-Speaks, and the Final, and calculate your score. Just remember that we do not guarantee that your guesses will be accurate, and we’re not going to do the math for you.