I had promised to give you some idea as to how we will figure out “Bonus Points”.
But first: what the bonus points do (since there seems to be some confusion).
For the workbooks: you receive a grade F-AB. These show up on Canvas as 0-3.5. So, a 3.5 is the best grade you can get on a 3.5. Canvas will tell you that you have an 87.5 percent (3.5/4). Similarly, Canvas will tell you that you are getting 50% when you have a C.
You assignment/workbook grade is the average of the workbooks after dropping the lowest 2. So it is an average over 10 workbooks (there will be 12 total this semester). You “bonus point addition” gets added to this.
Your exam grade (curved) is also on the same F-A scale (so an A=4). We will grade the final on the same scale. The final is worth more than the midterm.
All of that was on the course policy page (except that Canvas decides to show you things in percents).
The thing that isn’t in the policy page: how will we determine the “bonus point addition” (the up to 1/2 a grade we add to the workbook average).
This is tricky because (1) it wasn’t clear how many bonus point opportunities there were going to be over the course of the semester, (2) not all bonus points are the same, and (3) not all bonus points were awarded the same way. For example, in workbook 2, we gave separate bonus points for each little piece of making fireworks, but on Workbook 5, implementing arc length parameterization was only 1 line item.
How we’ll do this:
Each bonus point will be assigned a value 1-4. Small Things are 1, the biggest things will be 4. The exact assignment of points is still being worked out, and may not be known until we do the final grading. All bonus points will worth at least 1. Right now, it looks like we’ve had about 55 points from 36 possible bonus points on the first 6 assignments. I expect the second half of the assignments to have around the same amount of possibilities.
There won’t be a hard cutoff to get the bonus point addition. We’ll do linear interpolation. If you get more than (approximately) 30% of the points, you will get some addition. It you get (approximately) 60% points or more, you get the full .5 addition. I am not picking the exact values, because I might want to be more generous in the end (I will only lower the thresholds, not raise them). It might be more like 25%-50%.