Course Grades

Overall scores for the course will be determined roughly as follows:

70% Homework
20% Final exam
10% Midterm exam

Homework assignments will not be weighted equally because they are of different length and sophistication. Later assignments will generally be weighted more heavily because they are more involved. In particular, we expect the individual assignments to have the following weights in the overall grade:

5% HW1–2
8% each HW3–7
10% each HW8–9

That said, we may need to adjust the weights if any assignments turn out to be much more difficult or easier than expected.

We expect overall percentage scores to be translated into course grades roughly as follows:

96.5% 4.0
94.5% 3.9
92.5% 3.8
90.5% 3.7
88.5% 3.6
86.0% 3.5
84.0% 3.4
82.0% 3.3
80.0% 3.2
78.0% 3.1
75.5% 3.0
73.5% 2.9
71.5% 2.8
69.5% 2.7
67.5% 2.6
65.0% 2.5
63.0% 2.4
61.0% 2.3

Grades for scores below 60% will be determined by the instructors on a case-by-case basis. (In particular, we reserve the right to pass students whose percentages would fall below 2.0 if we continued the table above.)

We expect the median grade to be about 90% on the homework assignments and 80% on the exams. That would translate into an overall percentage score of 87%, using the tentative weights in the first table above. Per the second table, that translates to a 3.5 grade as it is above 86.0% and below 88.5%.