Grading
I graded all the questions anonymously, without knowing who wrote them. Most of your answers, unless they are completely correct, are annotated in some way, either through the rubrics or through comments on the answers.
Accessing your second test grades
Your second test grades, together with an image of your graded test, are on Gradescope, for which you should already have a log-in from earlier in the course. Look for an email from Gradescope including a link to your test. Let me know if you have any problems.
Calculating your Second Test grade
This test contained ten main questions (some with subparts), and each of them was worth the same number of points. I have treated those main questions as worth eight points each.
So, the total number of possible points for this test is (10 questions x 8 points each =) 80 points.
But as always you should not calculate your grade by converting your grade fraction to a hundred-point scale or similar. The way to calculate your grade is as follows:
To convert an 80-point test to a 4-point scale (see “Interpreting Grades” for more about 4-point scales), divide your score by 20 (because 80/20 = 4).
So, for example, if you earned 40 points out of 80 possible points, you would divide by 40 by 20 to get 2. And that would be equivalent to the grade of 2.0 out of 4.0, which is equivalent to a C. (On a hundred-point scale, 40/80 would therefore be equivalent to about 75, not 50.)
Test statistics
Some students are sometimes interested to know how the test was graded in the sense of how scores were distributed overall across all the tests. I will share with you the 25th and 75th percentile scores; together those bracket the range of the middle 50% of tests.
The half of the tests with grades in the middle 50% had scores between 38 and 75 points (out of 80). On a 4-point scale the middle 50% therefore spanned the range from 1.90/4.00 to 3.75/4.00. And so they ranged from (a score that rounds to) C to about A– on Hofstra’s letter-grade scale. That is, half the tests were between 1.90 and 3.75 on a 4-point scale, a quarter of them were at or below 1.90 (≈ C, or about 74/100), and a quarter of them were at or above 3.75 (A–, or about 91/100).
Relationship of your second test to your final grade
The second test is worth 25% of your final grade. See Interpreting Grades for more information. A strong final test can weigh slightly more heavily than 25%, however, if it indicates that you ultimately learned some things that were shaky for you earlier in the course.
I will be sending around emails to your Hofstra account with details about your final course grades as I also submit them. Look for them in your Hofstra email within a week.
Final remark
You — all of you — worked hard on this test and this course; you should feel proud of that! I hope you also learned some things in the course that you will think about in the future.