A note on Quiz grading
C-Term 2019

Hugh C. Lauer
Jonathan Weinstock
Teaching Professors

In this course (as in many other courses that we teach at WPI), each weekly quiz is worth 20 points except the final quiz, which is worth 40 points.

The quiz portion of your final grade is based on the best five of the seven quizzes. (In some terms, depending upon the calendar, it is best four out of six).

This means that we take the sum of the five highest numerical scores of your quizzes and divide by 120 points to get a percentage. This percentage represents the quiz portion of your final grade for the course. (For terms with six quizzes, we take the best four numerical grades and divide by 100 points, instead).

The advantage is that students don’t have to worry about missing a quiz during the term due to illness, conflicts, athletic events or off-campus trips, etc. No permission is required for such absences, and no make-up quizzes are offered.

The final quiz is mandatory for earning a grade for the course. Not taking the final quiz is equivalent to asking for a grade of NR for the term.

That being said, each year some students try to “game the system” by asking whether they can “slack off” the final quiz if they have done very well on the other quizzes during the term.

The answer is NO!

The final quiz contributes twice as much to the quiz portion of the course grade than any other quiz. Therefore, deliberately accepting a low grade on the final depresses the overall quiz average — usually enough to reduce the course grade by one full letter grade.