ResultsYou'll notice in the charts a student named "PERF" who was created to be the perfect student and always comes to class and gets perfect grades (but no extra credit). You can evaluate your performance based on this model student.AttendanceHere is the up-to-date attendance chart. The red stars denote your presence and a blue circle is an excused absence.
HomeworkResults of the homework assignments.
Below is the up-to-date histogram of the total homework scores as a percentage (out of 100%). This gives you an idea of where you stand relative to the class. So consult the above figure to get your percentage and look where you are in this figure. If you are to the left, it would be a good idea to complete all your assignments as accurately as possible from now on. The homeworks are relatively easy and all of the students should be to the right of 50% at least just by handing the assignments in.
QuizzesBelow is a chart of your up-to-date quiz scores for the semester.
The "Lunar Phases" quiz was given to reinforce your familiarity with how the Moon changes over the course of a month. I want you to be able to go outside and see the Moon and tell your friends what phase it is in, and to not be surprised when you see the Moon during the day or at different times at night or whenever. There were 3 students who answered every question correctly, so the questions should not have been too difficult or surprising. Below is the distribution of the scores in a histrogram plot:
Remember that there were 4 extra credit points. The median is the score whereby half of the students are above and half below it. The mean is just the average of all scores. The low scores are a little worrisome, but do not worry too much about your score. There is plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to improve your grade. Remember, you can get tons of points just by completing your homework assignments on time.
This quiz was not meant to be tricky, rather to get you familiar with Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation because they are so important for this course. They will also be a part of the exam next week. It was strange that there were about 8 absences for the quiz. But the grades tell me that the material was not learned well enough. The question most commonly answered incorrectly was number 3. A net force doesn't always change an object's acceleration. You can have a constant force which will impart a constant acceleration. What does change though, for any acceleration, is the velocity. Velocity wasn't one of the choices, but momentum has velocity in it. So the momentum is ALWAYS changed if a net force is present. Below are the scores:
The average score was about 12.5 out of 20, including 4 possible extra credit points.
The grades on this quiz were very good, as the distribution below shows.
LabsYou can view your lab grades in a spreadsheet at this link. ExamsHere are the scores for all of the exams:
Below is the histogram of the grades from the first exam:
From the above diagram we can see some really excellent scores and several discouraging ones. Mostly there are scores hovering about the average. The average was about a 77.4, or 73%. Please note: This is only the first exam! Your final grade in this course is a combination of the all of the course components. Please re-read the syllabus. Your exams count for 40% of your grade, so this exam is only 10-15%. So if you've done well, then you have to keep up that good effort and continue to do the homeworks and labs. If you did not do well, then there is time to turn it around and get back in the right direction to obtain a good final grade. I encourage you to come and see me so we can find out why this exam caused you so much trouble. There might be some easy answers. To give you a rough estimation of your letter grade for this exam, look at the following graph:
This is the same plot as the one above, but now with specific regions of grades. The way this plot was obtained is the following: The top 8 scores (not counting the highest one) were averaged to find a number; this was about a little over 92. The thinking is that since this is about 14 points below the maximum score obtainable (106, without extra credit), then the exam may have been about 14 points too hard. So then everybody was given 14 extra points. Then from that score, letter-grade cutoffs corresponding to 90%=A, 80%=B, 70%=C, 60%=D were plotted as seen above. So for example, without the extra points you needed a score of 95 points to be above the 90% line. But with the 14 extra points or so, a score of about 83 will now put you in the 90% range.
Here is the distribution of the scores for the second exam:
While the average score as a percentage was 73% in the first exam, this one is at about 81% (70 points out of a possible 86). So there was a better overall effort and I'm pretty happy with it. Good job to you! To get an approximate idea of your "letter" score, I did a curve similar to the first exam (go above to read about that). Remember, this is only approximate and may not reflect your actual letter grade, since these exams will have different "weights" depending on how your trend is, i.e., if you are making improvements over the course of the entire semester. Anyway, you can find your score in one of the letter slots in the figure below.
This is kind of a biggish curve since almost any score above the average is just about an A. At the end of the semester the curve for this exam may be reduced somewhat, but this gives you an idea. Because of some other concerns, I made another plot that shows the average score (as a percentage) versus number of classes missed. So, for example, I take all the scores for students who missed so far, say, 3 classes, average those, and plot that number. Then I do it for each number of classes missed. The result is shown below:
Please note the disturbing trend that the more classes that are missed, the lower the scores tend to be (with some exceptions). This indicates that some important information being discussed in class is not being learned by those who miss class. Hopefully this will motivate students to attend class consistently between now and the final.
Here is the distribution of the curved scores for the third and final exam, along with the rough letter grade the score corresponds to:
The final exam was curved in a similar way to the other exams. An average of the top group of students was taken and the difference between that score and the total possible score was added to everyone's grade. Notice that actually 8 scores were over 100%, which is a great achievement. The average was right around the A/B border line. You can find your individual score above in the exams figure.
One final interesting plot is shown below. Final course grades (out of 100 percent) were plotted versus number of unexcused absences for each student. Final letter grades were also delineated. A good number of students earned an "A" in the class, and not many of them missed more than a few classes. The further to the right you look, the lower the grades are. You should keep that in mind for future courses. Of course some students missed very few classes and still did not do that well, which shows that you also have to pay attention and complete all assignments too. Note that in this figure, a red dot on one of the dotted lines denotes the letter grade below that line.
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