Scenario 4

Grading

Professor Grey teaches Zoology 201 each semester. He relies on a grading system that he has been using for the last 15 years, which he has found to be effective and fair for his students:

• He weights each of his three exams at 20% of the grade, all homework to 15%, quizzes at 15%, and participation is worth 10%.
• He tracks attendance/participation in the gradebook.
• He prefers to comment in-line on written assignments and provide students the ability to submit responses in video and audio formats.
• He drops 1 quiz, 1 homework, and drops 20% of the participation points.
  • Participation points are out of a total of 200, but this becomes 160 after he drops the 20%. If a student would receive more than 160 points, then this is just changed to a 100% for the participation column.
• He also takes into account any specific considerations that might impact what is fair for a particular student, such as dropping an additional quiz for an excused illness or other event.
• After the third exam, Professor Grey also offers extra credit opportunities where the points do not fit into any of the sections above.
• At the end of the semester, he displays the final grade as a letter (A, B, C, D, F) to each student based on a predefined cutoff.

Students in Professor Grey’s course need to be able to assess their current and/or projected course performance at various points in the semester. The students should be able to input “what-if” scores into the gradebook to see how their overall course grade is impacted.