Midweek Update (Wednesday, September 27)

The homework assignment distributed today is due Friday, September 29. The handout said Friday the 30th. However Friday is the 29th. The 30th is Saturday. It is not due Saturday. My bad. It was a typo. If you did not get a copy of the assignment you can get a copy from the I-drive. Also, they are just problems 1 and 2 from the end of chapter problems on p. 183 in the Krugman and Wells text.

For those of you who did not get the whole explanation of the distribution of grades, here is a summary of the distribution of grades and what it means to you.

The overall mean was a 28.2 out of 40 points. That's about a 70.5%. (To find your percentage score you take your overall score and divide by 40.) It is your raw score that I enter into the grade book. It gets weighted appropriately (more explanation on that at some later point). Two other measures of "centrality" are the median (middle score), which was 27.75 and the mode (the most frequently occurring score), which was 26. This means the "curve" was a bit lopsided. (If the bell curve could ring it would probably have some awful sound.) The standard deviation was 4.5 points (about 11.3%) which means scores were scattered all around rather widely. The bell curve is looking like a cymbal.

So the following can be used as a guide for how well you did on the test.

A range: 33 and higher
B range: 28 - 32.5
C range: 24 - 27.5
D range: 20 - 23.5
If you got below a 20 that is not very good.

Please note: I do not enter this grade into my gradebook. I enter just the raw score. The only curve that will ultimately matter is the curve at the end of the semester with all the grades. Typically that gets closer to my desired mean of 80% and my desired standard deviation of 10%, allowing me to use the default scale as explained in the syllabus. (A: 90-100, B: 80-89.99, etc.)

I'll continue to explain this scaling after each test so that at least in preparation for the final you will have a pretty good idea of how much you need to prepare to get the desired grade.

Good luck.