8.01 Final Course Average Results, Fall 2000

The average of the final course average grades for all 8.01 students was 68.9%.

The passing grade for the final course average has been set at 59.0, and other numerical grades can be translated into letter grades according to the following chart:

After the grades were computed numerically, those students who were just a point or two below the borderlines were discussed at a meeting of all the 8.01 staff. On the basis of this discussion, a small number of students were pushed above the borderline and given a grade higher than their numerical average would indicate. The most common reason for such a grade increase was the case of a student who had shown very significant improvement during the term.

For the problem sets, your lowest score was dropped and the remaining scores were averaged.

For the recitation quizzes the calculation is more complicated, because each instructor both composed and graded the recitation quizzes for his/her students. We try to do the best we can to compensate for the fact that recitation instructors have different styles, in terms of the difficulty of their quizzes and the manner in which they are graded. The recitatation quiz grades were therefore adjusted by a process that we call "renormalization." Each instructor is calibrated by comparing the recitation quiz grades of his/her students with their hour exam and final examination grades (which are team-graded), and the recitation quiz grades are corrected accordingly. The correction formula guarantees that the average of the recitation quiz grades for all 8.01 students will either not be changed, or will perhaps go up a little.

HOW TO COMPUTE YOUR RENORMALIZED RECITATION QUIZ GRADE:

STEP 1: Computation of Raw Grade

Drop your lowest grade and average the others. They should be adjusted so that the maximum possible grade is 100.

STEP 2: Computation of Renormalized Grade

We have experimented with three different methods of renormalization, but found that none of them seemed to be fair in all cases. We have therefore decided to use all three, and for each student the maximum of the three calculations is used for the renormalized grade. For each instructor, four parameters were determined by comparing the Recitation Quiz grades with the average of the grades on the team-graded exams for the instructor's students. A table of these parameters is as follows:

TABLE OF RENORMALIZATION PARAMETERS:

Sections	Instructor	R	Q	M	B
1, 2, & 3	Bertozzi	0.953	1.129	1.107	-12.2
4 & 5	Stephans	1.143	0.721	1.176	-2.0
6, 7, & 8	Feld	1.082	0.806	0.828	18.1
9, 10, & 11	Joss	1.060	0.872	1.026	2.8
12	Bolton	0.961	1.362	1.435	-39.9
13 & 14	Shelton	0.990	0.974	1.025	-2.8
15	Guth	0.954	1.300	1.457	-41.6
16	Fernie	1.023	0.876	1.080	-4.3
17	Ribeiro	1.159	0.683	0.935	12.2
18, 19, & 20	Burke	0.872	1.650	1.061	-16.3
21 & 22	Evans	0.983	1.086	0.968	1.2
23 & 24	Hager	0.963	1.112	0.992	-2.3
26	McBride/Bove	0.903	2.160	1.672	-69.2

Use the parameters in the above table to compute your renormalized Recitation Quiz grades by each of the following three methods, and then take the maximum of the three:

Method 1:

Renormalized Grade = R * (Raw Grade)

Method 2:

Renormalized Grade = 100 - Q*(100 - Raw Grade)

Method 3:

Renormalized Grade = M * (Raw Grade) + B

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED:

• How were the renormalization parameters computed?