What grade am I currently getting? / How do you compute grades? / I’d like to discuss or change my grade.

At any point during or after the semester, if you would like a full breakdown of your course grade (mark), email me and I’ll send you a file with all the information. Your request indicates that you are comfortable with my sharing your course grade information by email. If you are not comfortable with my sharing your course grade information by email, you can meet with me in person (or otherwise in real time) during Office Hours — I can break down your grade in person. (I do not post grade breakdowns on Quercus or other campus-based apps — click here to learn why.)

Any computation beyond that is up to you (e.g. “what score do I need to get on x to earn y?”). Further discussion of marks has to be conducted in real time, in my Office Hours—you’ll need to make time to make that happen.

I maintain an ongoing record of all student course marks in Excel files on my office computer (backed up twice over in other locations, of course). The weight I give to each element of the course mark is detailed clearly in the course’s syllabus. Please look over that information fully, in addition to this page, before asking me any further questions about your mark.

Students only very, very rarely ask me to adjust a grade (mark). I’m proud to say that I give my students a very clear picture of how my grading works, and they have been consistently convinced of my system’s fairness. I post this page, primarily, to give curious students a sense of what the grading process looks like — because knowing how the system works might better allow you to aim for a higher mark in the first place, or to understand the mark you have received.

In all areas, I observe the Faculty of Arts and Science grading scale.

To be clear: marks above 79 are reserved for work that I can confidently say exhibits excellence. Excellence is, by definition, generally exhibited only by a relatively small fraction of work turned in at any given time.

I generally use numerical marks throughout the term — there is rarely any translation to or from letters until I input the grades at the very end. That includes participation, which I generally compute twice per term (once at midterm and once at the end). As I mark written work, I continually make small adjustments based both on an overall sense of what kind of work corresponds to which score—based on a decade’s worth of paper-marking—and on comparisons between you and your classmates (“if this essay earned a 76, then this essay must be a 77 or higher”). All markers experience “drift” during the marking process; I combat this by periodically comparing similar written assignments and making sure that truly similar work earns appropriately similar marks.

I always take extra care to make my evaluative criteria clear on my course website (including assignment prompts). If you don’t remember seeing such criteria, go back and check—they’re there!

Depending on the nature of the assignment, I may translate those evaluative criteria into provisional numerical values (e.g. 50% for argumentation/logic, 25% for style, 15% for innovation, 10% for proofreading). These subdivisions are only there to help me crystallize, into a repeatable system, the evaluative criteria that I have already made fully clear to the class.

When I am testing out a new assignment or syllabus, meaning that I have never before seen student performance on this particular task, then at the end of a round of marking I also make sure that the average mark is at least 73.5 — and if it isn’t, I adjust all marks equally until the average is 73.5.  

I will never bring marks down to meet an average — if I assigned a task that was too easy, then that’s my fault.  And if the entire class is doing work below the desired average, I take responsibility for that too as a matter of trust and mutual respect.  I generally apply the same rule to all assignments, even ones I’ve used many times.

All this is to say that my marking system is extremely specific, down to the difference of half a point. You can rest assured that I have triple-checked your mark based on a variety of criteria. But that also makes it highly unlikely that I will adjust a mark after the fact. That is part of why, while I am happy to meet with any student who wishes to adjust a mark, I will only ever discuss the issue during my office hours.