Would it be reasonable to make a final worth 70% of your class grade as a professor? I could make the HW and the 2 or 3 mid semester exams all worth 30% in total for attemption. This way the students would just have to do good on the final to pass the course, does anyone else see a problem with this?
This is for calculus 3 by the way
seems disproportionate. I'd do 20% 30% 50% for hw, midterms, final
I think it's reasonable. Your students will not (assuming you're in the US). They're far too used to having grade padding in the form of participation and homework.
not for calculus, they need practice
You can't put that much weight on one thing
Have the final replace the lowest exam score. Having the prior exams and homework contribute so little to the final grade would just incentivize many students to disregard them entirely.
Eh, general rule I go with is 10% for HW, 20% for midterm, rest for finals. If you have 3 midterms, though, I would suggest making the lowest score midterm dropped and that way the final is worth 50%.
Nope. That's retarded. Unless there is no time constraint I would feel like I'm being duped
It depends on what questions you ask on the final. If they're just run of the mill problems, then 70% is too high. This is because what's on the final should be indicative of what was important in the course, so if you put normal problems on there, you've already admitted that the homework was the most important part. The grade breakdown should indicate what's important.
If you're doing proofs on the exam, then you're actually asking the students to think, which requires them to really understand the material. This is when 70% becomes more reasonable.
Keep mini test throughout the semester for 20%. Finals should at the Max be 50%.
every class I have taken the final is 40-50%. 70 seems a bit high, honestly.
stop making homework so heavy of a weight. I should be able to skip all my homework and have the possibility of getting an A, not a highest of a C
The most reasonable grading system that I’ve had used trendlines. That way if you steadily improve it will be taken into account, and anomalies aren’t taken into account.
This
It's not grade padding so much as that none of them will even think about calculus all semester unless they have constant graded assignments.
Huh what is this. America? You are expected to reach a certain standard. Just dont show up in the first quarter, and start stuying in the second and profit?
so do actual college professors shitpost on Veeky Forums or is this just LARPing?
No, that's quite unreasonable, an undergraduate-level class is supposed to be a structured learning experience, not just presenting material for students to study on their own like a graduate level class or professional exam.
It would be entirely reasonable to make the homework, say, 10% of the grade and midterm exams 30-40%, but to make the midterms have so little value significantly undermines the students' learning experience.
Midterms are for testing specific examples in great detail whereas the final is for ensuring students have a comprehensive understanding of the core topics of the class, if you truly care about helping your students learn and not just doing as little teaching work as possible you should take advantage of both.
What if you still had homework/quizzes/etc count for a decent portion of the student's grade but allow exam scores to overwrite their grade for that section if they are higher? Effectively allows confident students to skip out on unnecessary work but doesn't totally screw them over if they get one bad exam score.
This has always struck me as the fairest way to grade a class - allow most of the students who need more guidance and effort to boost their grade with homework, while not penalizing those who can study the material on their own for the final.
The only problem with this is presenting it as an option in low-level classes - overconfident freshmen and sophomores will just neglect doing any of their work planning on doing well on the exam, and then not actually put in the time to do well on the exams and end up with a hopelessly failing grade, you can blame it on the student but, it's inevitable when you introduce it as an option.
LARPing they've seen pictures of funny threads and want to be liked
Just make it 20 for each exam and 30 for final, with homework for other percentages. I think its best if their grade on the final is able to overwrite how well they do in the class.
Like if someone is doing poorly, they can completely fix their grade with a good final
>No, that's quite unreasonable, an undergraduate-level class is supposed to be a structured learning experience, not just presenting material for students to study on their own like a graduate level class or professional exam.
Can you explain that? In my undergraduate, most classes (though not all) just had one exam at the end that you had to pass. No homework, no midterms, none of that.
A "structured learning experience" sounds like something that makes sense for high school, not university. You are teaching adults, after all. Preparing for the exam is your own responsibility, and you can do as much or as little practice problems to prepare as you deem necessary.
If the point of university is to learn, why not structure classes in the way that best facilitates that? Besides, exams are fucking dumb. You can't give interesting problems in a timed environment.
Fucking lol at Murrikans ITT. In the UK it's normal for the final exam to be 80 % to 100 % of a class' grade
I have wondered if you couldn't have two tracks. One for those to just take the tests. Another for those who have test anxiety or whatever to score them on homework.
At my university (in the EU), there's nearly always only one final exam that determines your whole grade. Sometimes there are small mandatory assignments that you need to pass to even being able to enter the exam.
30% of the grade is fucking homework? lmao americans
It’s not Americans. It’s some meme shit college. I teach high school math and homework is only 20% of the grade for freshmen.
Yet tons of Europeans and people from other countries try their hardest to get into American universities. Lmfao. Don’t know a single American who has said, “I want to go to a European university”.
It's funny, in graduate school all the exams are heavily curved, I would argue my undergraduate classes were far harder. To get below a B means you really fucked up.
>You can't put that much weight on one thing
But everyone in Europe is doing that and it seems to work? Either swim or sink. You either know the material or not.
European schools don’t have to educate niggers and brainlets, they weed them out at like age 13 and send them to copy repair school.
We have to educate real estate agents and nurses in high school and most colleges. Not a fair comparison.
Yeah, maybe into your 2-3 Ivy-League ones and that's only due the prestige, not the actual learning.
In the US every University needs a water-proof system so that even the stupid ones are able to get a degree. Otherwise the Universities wouldn't make money, right?
I've had classes where the only grade was the final. I've also had classes where the only grade was homework. I did fine in the final. Just don't make it ridiculous or put over the top tricky problems on it. ie no triple integrals. I've only taught coordinated courses so I didn't get to make a grading scale. I'm lazy though and I just give participation on quizzes and homework and grade tests on a 0/50/100 scale per problem as partial credit. Final is Scantron. I only teach retard algebra. The final in that class is 25%. They would cry if it was 100% and I gave no padding. If I taught a course it would be 100% on the final where you get like 15 questions and pick 10 to do, 10% each. It would mostly be out of laziness.
This.
OP, this is totally fine, don't listen to burger brainlets itt. Make it 100%, no curving, but make sure it is possible not to fail.
Keep telling yourself that while struggling with the calculus 3 mid-term.
You can make them think, if you only allow students with all homeworks to even take the final.
Should be 60/40 respectively. It will motivate students to study and know the material rather than padding their grade with other assignments, but it won't completely fuck them over if they made a subpar score on anything.
Thats a first year course even for us burgers. Assuming the student comes in and starts at calc 1, thanks to the quarter system, they are in calc 3 by spring. Lmao. I go to UC Irvine and there are tons of international students here, especially from the EU. So plz stop.
Good thing I'm already done with education freshie. Anyway, what you guys might Calc 2 and Calc 3 is highschool and more in-depth first semester of University to us. But there's no point in arguing.
I had a professor who replaced every grade lower than the final, with the final, so an A on the final guaranteed an A in the course.
>We have to educate real estate agents and nurses in high school and most colleges.
Why? What's keeping you from having separate tracks for academic education on one hand in universities, and vocational trade school programs as a separate track?
1/2
Is the final going to be comprehensive or mostly about recent material? Are students going to need to study like crazy to pass? Are you trying to test if the students know all the material or if they knew each portion of the material at some point during the class?
If the final is mostly about new material, the students don't need to study like crazy, and you're testing if they students know some specific material, then no. A 70% final would be dumb because you're only testing a small part of the material.
If the final is going to be comprehensive, the students don't need to study like crazy, and you're testing if they at least knew the material at some point, then no. A 70% final would be dumb because you're making the work the students took to understand the material well enough for midterms and homework irrelevant.
If the final is going to be comprehensive, the students need to study like crazy, and you're testing if students know all the material well, then yes. A 70% final would make sense, but I'd argue that putting the majority of a semester into one super hard test is bad teaching.
I know there are people on here who will make "lel brainlet" jokes, but where does the "stick everything into a super hard final" reasoning end? If you have a series of classes (ie Physic I & II, EM Fields I & II, Data Structures I & II, Calculus I & II & III), why not just have one final at the end of each series? Why not just have one final at the end of your bachelors? If you do things this way, then failure is catastrophic and requires lengthy retakes. If you split university grades up into class grades and class grades up into assignment and test grades, then the consequences of failure are spread out. Just because you do poorly in one class, doesn't mean you should have to retake an entire degree, and just because you do poorly on one grade, doesn't mean you should have to retake the entire course.
2/2
If you're worried about students who know all the material by the end of class, but end up having bad grades on everything except the final, then you can make a grading system that helps them. You don't have to stick to weighted averages, you could do like what 's professor suggested. If the final exam grade is better than the weighted average grade, just replace the final class grade with the final exam grade.
Just my two cents.
At my school they make the final worth either 50% or 75% depending on which option gives you a better grade.
A final should never be worth more than 50% of the class grade, anything otherwise is bad teaching. You don’t want to kill off midwits and upper midwits, they’re necessary to keep society in order. You’re not a fucking physics graduate professor you absolute faggot
Are midwits really taking cal III though?
here's a motivation to study and do homework:
if you don't you'll get assfucked in the final.
I actually have no idea what calculus 3 is, since my school doesn't split up calculus into several classes.
>A final should never be worth more than 50% of the class grade, anything otherwise is bad teaching
Fucking lol. You're going to university, not fucking kindergarten. Oh well, at least your parents' money will be funding the education of graduate students who aren't fucking retarded.
For me, it's more that having fewer grades is more volatile since one stupid mistake can become a huge mistake that doesn't necessarily reflect your actual knowledge of the subject. My midterm, 25% of my total grade, was 3 questions, and I made a D on it because I read an "R" as a "B" because of a combination of being tired from being on campus for 12 hours and the small font that was used.
>overconfident freshmen and sophomores will just neglect doing any of their work planning on doing well on the exam, and then not actually put in the time to do well on the exams and end up with a hopelessly failing grade
That was me last semester, except I rose like a phoenix from the ashes when I realized I'm actually dumb and somehow landed an A at the end of it after failing half my tests.
D is the best an illiterate student should hope for.
My favorite classes went something like this.
Two midterms, each 25% of your grade for a total of 50%
The final is worth the other 50%.
No assigned homework, no extra credit, no dropped exams, make the exams balls fucking hard, to the point where they are unfinishable by all but the brightest/hardest working of students.
Scare all your students stiff of you and the class. Make most of them drop when they inevitably bonk the first midterm.
BUT, to everyone who stuck it out in the end, make the final exam easier than the midterms, and have a flat B or B- cut off for the median score in the class. Moreover, you don't assign homework, but you recommend problems and problem sets related to the material you teach. This does a couple things
Brainlet out. (Hopefully after first midterm)
Normies who work hard and pay attention and do all the recommended exercises end up with a B or better, so they're happy, but have also worked hard and thus learned a lot
And the occasional bright student can just do what they feel is necessary to do well in your class.
Honestly I feel this is the best way. The midterms are the right weight to be taken seriously and thus scare students into working harder or quitting if they do badly, and the final is big enough and easy enough to reward students who stuck it out and worked hard enough.
One more thing, my professor who did this, would actually tell us exactly how many questions were on each exam and what material each question pertained to.
But the questions were so hard most people couldnt finish them. But since everyone knew what to expect, you actually studied the right things and learned something