UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PHILOSOPHY 100: INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY
Vere Chappell, Tom Bell, Andrew Platt Fall 2003
GRADES
Your grade for the semester will be based on two factors: (1) the weighted numerical average of your quiz and exam scores; and (2) your participation in class discussion (in discussion sections). (1) Each quiz score will be counted as 5% of the total numerical average, each exam score as 15%, and the final exam score as 20%. Since only the ten highest quiz scores and the two highest exam score will be counted, your quiz average will count for 50% of your total numerical average, your exam average for 30%, and your final exam for 20%. (2) Up to 10 points will be awarded for participation in class discussions, at the discretion of the section instructors. Only active participants will be awarded such points; students who have merely attended discussion sections, even if they have kept awake and looked interested, will not get them. Points for participation will be added to the numerical quiz and exam average; hence a student with 100s on all quizzes and exams who gets the maximum number of points for participation would have a total score of 110. Once a final numerical score, consisting of (1) and (2) as described above, has been determined for each student, we will examine the aggregate of all such scores for the whole class, all 180 of you. We will consider not only the average of this set of scores but also its distribution: the number in the ranges 90 or above, 80 to 89, and so on. We will then assign letter grades to these scores (note that no such assignment will have been made before this time). The assignment we make will depend on the actual performance - as represented by their final numerical scores - of all the students in this particular class. Such performance is likely to be better or worse than the 'average' or 'normal' performance that is assumed by the traditional 'default' correlation of letter grades with numerical scores. This default correlation is as follows: scores 90 or above correspond to A, 85-89 to AB, 80-84 to B, and so on down to 60-64, which corresponds to D. On this scale, students with scores 59 or lower receive F and so fail the course. But suppose your class has done better, overall, than the average or normal class: suppose, for example, the average score is around 80 and the percentage of students with scores above 90 is 25 or more. In that case, we might raise the scale so that A corresponds to 95 or above and the pass/fail line is set at 65. Or suppose your class has done worse than the average or normal class: suppose the average is 65 or below and fewer than 10% of you get scores above 90. In that case, we might lower the scale so that A corresponds to 85 or above and the pass/fail line is set at 55 or even below. Unfortunately, there is no way for you (or for us, your instructors) to know ahead of time how your numerical scores will be correlated with letter grades. You will know what letter grade you in particular receive for the course when you hear from the Registrar some time in January. But you can get information about the correlation in general, and also receive details about your particular performance on Exam 3 and the Final, by sending an e-mail message to Professor Chappell. Do not do this, however, until the spring semester has started: he will be out of the country for most of January. One final note. Students often ask whether grades for this course will be 'curved'. The accurate answer is that they will not; but our guess is that most students who ask this question don't really mean 'curved'. What they want to know is whether the final grades will depend in some way on the class's actual performance - as opposed to being determined by some fixed 'ideal' or 'objective' standard. And the answer to that question is that the grades for this class *will* depend on the actual performance of the class, in the way described above.