uva/old/grades-fall-2020.html

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<h1 id="grading-explanations-fall-2020">Grading Explanations, Fall 2020</h1>
<p><a href="index.html">Go up to the CS 2150 page</a> (<a href="index.md">md</a>)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As per the <a href="syllabus.html">syllabus</a> (<a href="syllabus.md">md</a>), the grades were computed by:</p>
<ul>
<li>Laboratories (70%)</li>
<li>Final exam (30%)</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-process-of-grade-determination">The Process of Grade Determination</h2>
<ul>
<li>The average on the labs was 89.1% (stdev 16.8); as a side-note, this was significantly higher than it has ever been in the past.</li>
<li>The average on the final was 72.0% (stdev 16.5); final grades of zero – those who didn’t take the final – are not counted in this average</li>
<li>When weighted as above, the final course average was a 83.9, which is a B</li>
</ul>
<p>Due to the very high course average, there was no additional course curve, although we did round up if necessary.</p>
<p>For a given decade, 80 to just under 83 was a B-, 83 to just under 87 was B, and 87 to just under 90 was a B+; similarly for the other decades. The D- range was extended down a bit to a 55 or above, the A range was set at 94 (not 93), and the A+ range is based on a percentage of students in the course – and was a 99. We did not give C- grades, due to how the C- grade interacts with the C/GC/NC scoring and pre-reqs, so anybody would would have gotten a C- instead got a C. Note that for all these scores, we rounded up your final course average if necessary.</p>
<h2 id="final-exam-grading">Final exam grading</h2>
<p>While the final exam went well, we ran into a few issues with the system and the questions that have now been resolved:</p>
<ul>
<li>Some text fill-in answers that were incorrect were being given credit due to a bug in the system; those no longer get credit (sorry!).</li>
<li>Two of the questions did not have the correct answers entered; we fixed this, and those are now being graded correctly.</li>
<li>We ended up accepting two answers for a few of the multiple-choice questions; for those questions, students got credit if they submitted either of the correct answers.</li>
<li>For some people, the memory question was a fill-in question. This was graded by hand, and was given either 0 or 3 points. The question was what could occasionally cause a seg fault. Any answer that would <em>always</em> cause a seg fault was not given credit (such as following a nullptr).</li>
<li>Some people interpreted the no-spaces comment in the baby yoda encoding to mean that one should encode ‘babyyoda’ (with no space); this was also given full credit.</li>
</ul>
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