Research Methods in Psychological Science Psychology 242

The actual grades are posted here. This page describes what the labels mean, as well as how your grade was computed.

The grades were last updated on Sunday, May 2nd.

Here is an explanation of what each variable label refers to.

exam1c - your grade on exam 1. This is the corrected grade--the one that accounts for the problems with question 3.

exam2 - exam4 - your grade on exams 2 - 3.

quiz1 - quiz5 - your grade on quizzes 1 - 5. These are now expressed as percentages correct.

web1 - your grade on the first web exercise--the one on basic demographics, zodiac sign, etc. This is expressed as a percentage.

web2 - your grade on the second web exercise--the one in which you collected love test data from your friends. This is expressed as a percentage.

home1 - your grade for the love test homework. This is the exercise in which you computed love scores for people. This is expressed as a percentage.

home2 - your grade for the love test homework. This is the exercise in which you computed the correlation between two variables. This is expressed as a percentage.

home3 - your grade for the longitudinal, personality change exercise. (This counts three times; see below.) This is expressed as a percentage.

attend - your grade for section/lab attendance. This is expressed as a percentage.

gradet - your grade at this point in time--before the final. This is the grade you will get in the class if you do not take the final exam. If you are happy with this grade, there is no need to take the final. I explain below how this grade was computed.

How was your grade computed? Here is the formula I used to compute final grades:

grade = .60*mean(exam1c, exam2, exam3, exam4) + .10*mean(quiz1, quiz2, quiz3, quiz4, quiz5) + .20*mean(web1, web2, home1, home2, home3, home3, home3, attend) + .10.


A few things to note about this formula:

1. The average of your best four exams (at this point in the game, the only four exams you have taken) is weighted by 60%. In other words, your exams count toward 60% of your final grade.

2. The average of your quizzes counts 10% toward your final grade. Originally, the quizzes were going to count 20%, but since we've had so few quizzes, I decided to allow them to count 10% instead. The remaining 10% is free to you, and it has been tacked on at the end of the formula listed above.

3. The lab activities count 20% toward your final grade. Each assignment counts equally, with the exception of home3, which gets counted three times.

4. You should be able to use this formula to calculate the grade you would receive if, for example, you were to drop exam 1 and substitute your final exam grade (say, a 95) in its place. This will give you a good sense of what you need on the final to achieve a specific grade in this class (and whether this is even possible in the first place).

5. If you try to calculate your grade yourself and find that it differs in some minor way from what we've posted, those difference are due only to rounding errors (or due to computational errors on your part). The grades posted here are the correct grades--the grades that consider the many decimal places that may exist in some of the averages--decimal places that can't be seen easily on your computer screen due to the limitations of printing extended digits. Grades will not be rounded up when all is said and done. Thus, if your grade is currently an 89.99999, don't assume I will round this to a 90 when I record the final grades.