Grading

Grading

I accumulate grading in a spreadsheet. There may be some adjustment in awarding of final grades, dependent upon what is assigned. I may elect to change assignments or weighting. The current spreadsheet weights (which should be similar to those listed in the syllabus; these below take precedence) are as follows:

Final Grade for Course

The weights for the term paper and term project may be changed.

Plagiarism will be noted with loss of a grade letter for the course or worse. If you have doubts about a sentence or a few that you have included, paste them into Google -- that's what I will do. If references to another author's work comes back, I guarantee that you will have a problem. So far, I have had four students (caught) who plagiarized. One ended up changing majors to stay here.

If you are uncertain, read http://www.fit.edu/current/plagiarism.pdf and http://www.fit.edu/uhb/dmes_ushb_7.html If you are writing down text from a book, be certain to put quotes around the notes so you don't later think that you thought that. It is someone else's work.

Quizzes and Further Grading Comments

Quizzes are brief (~four or five questions) given near the beginning of the class on the reading/knowledge of the day's subject. . . or on something else. I sometimes survey the class on the last class presentation, asking what should be changed. You are graded on your response to these feedback questions on usefulness. Don't say "nothing needs improvement", or you will get no points for that bland, unhelpful response.

Quiz and homework score contributions are each based upon averages over the entire course.

If we have a quiz when you have reported an absence in advance, you get a blank score entry that doesn't affect your quiz average.

There are usually more quizzes than homework assignments, but homework requires more effort. You may learn better from homework.

There may be some grade adjustments later at the professor's option. If a score is really close (say 0.3)  to the next higher letter grade, I might choose to give the higher grade, depending upon class involvement.

You may also earn extra credit (1-10 points; it's hard to get more than 5) for extra effort that furthers the goals of renewable energy, RE projects here, or sustainability advocacy.

The final examination covers the entire course, and thus is worth twice as much as the mid-term examination that covers only the first half of the course.

I am posting grades here to show you how you are doing. I estimate final grades early in the course, and these estimates change rapidly at first. These estimates will not include Final Exams since you will have the actual course grades by then.

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MiscClass/grading.htm updated 090203