Research Methods in Psychological Science Psychology 242

The final 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 May 4th.

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

e1 - e5 - your grades on exams 1- 5. (The 5th exam was the final.) Note: I have left blank your lowest exam score. That score does not count toward the computation of your class grade.

quiz1 - quiz5 - your grade on quizzes 1 - 5. These are 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.

gradef - your numeric grade in the class. This is explained in more depth below.

letter - your letter grade for class. This is based on the standard 10% rule (e.g., C = gradef >= 70 and gradef < 80)

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

gradef = .60*mean(e1, e2, e3, e4, e5) + .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 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. 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. Thus, if your grade is currently an 89.99999, this will be recorded as a B.

5. If you have questions about your grade, please contact your TA before contacting me. If your TA finds an error in your grade, he or she should e-mail me directly in order to have the error corrected. These corrections must be made no later than Friday afternoon.

6. If you are a few tenths of a point away from a higher letter grade, please do not bug your TA for extra points on past assignments. You have had plenty of time now to determine whether your older assignments were graded correctly and fairly. Like you, your TAs also have final exams to study for and they probably will not appreciate you taking their time to re-evaluate assignments they have already taken the time to grade. If you have noticed in error in what is listed here, however, please contact your TA as soon as possible.