Essay marking questiion

Durz0 Blint

I'm trying to calculate the marks I have received from past essays before going into the exams.


I got an A grade on an essay worth 40%

Does that mean that I only received 75% (since an a is 75) of the 40% available on the essay (so 30%) or do you get higher?

Is it only an A+ that gets full marks and if so, does that not mean that there is a massive difference in marks between an A and A+?

Durz0

ucdperson

An A+ is only slightly more than an A, as you would expect.

http://www.ucd.ie/registry/assessment/student_info/modulargradesexplained.pdf

Durz0 Blint

Presumably if you get an A+ you get full marks (in my case 40%).

But what do you get if you get an A - is it 75% of the exam essay marks?

beardedmaster

If you get an A+ you don't get 100%, you get 78.33%, as it is the calculation point for all A+ grades. Similarly, A is 75% and A- is 73.67%. So you would have 30% earned in a module from going into the exam with an A in an essay worth 40%.

As far as I know, the only exception to this is when you are given a percentage grade from continuous assessment (like an MCQ), instead of a A, B, etc grade. In all other cases, it's the calculation point, which is explained in the link above.

Durz0 Blint

Oh wow

So the best you can do on an essay is get 78.33% of the marks

Seems very unfair imo.

Vorophobe

UCD use "Gradebook" to keep track of all student results, and yes, even if you get 100% for an essay, when its entered into Gradebook it gets turned into A+... which means 78.33%

[Jackass]

Technically there's a seperation between percentage score and grade score.

You say it's worth 40%, but you're only getting a fraction of that, but actually you're getting an A+ weighting on 40% of your final grade, so it is technically full marks, but you are thinking in % terms as the grade, when the percentage is the weight of the grade, not the actual grade, if you get what I mean..

Durz0 Blint

I kind of get what you mean but I am confused by the details [Jackass].

Raphael

Lemme try and see if I can get it across.

In an essay based topic, your grade never exists numerically - an essay never gets given 10/10, it gets given an overall letter grade. In order to average grades across a module, you need a mechanism to add and subtract grades however. They use the same percentages that's used elsewhere, for convenience. But those numbers are just arbitrary, equally spaced figures, that each correspond to a letter.

Let say, for example, they replaced them with a numberline. D- = 1, D=2, D+=3, all the way up to A+=12. All you do in this example is add up the grades according to their weighting, then round to the nearest number, and that's the grade. So if you get an A+ for half the course and an A- for the rest, that's 12*.5 + 10*.5 = 11, which is an A.

Your mistake is looking at the number and thinking you could do better. For an essay, an A+ is full marks. Just because it uses a calculation point below 100, doesn't change that.

ucdperson

As the previous post says, the output from the grading process is a grade, the highest of which is a A+. The grades for various components are combined to get the grade for the overall module. Percentages are an input, you don't come out with percentages, so what the OP is trying to do does not make sense.

You have an A for the component worth 40% of your module, if you get a A+ in the final exam your gpa for the module will be
0.4x4+0.6x4.2 = 4.12 so you'd get an A+ overall for the module.

Durz0 Blint

Thank you

That clears things up for me

SparkySpitfire

Sorry, I was trying to figure out the exact same thing, then I read this thread and now I just need to check that my thinking is correct here...

So if anyone could verify that would be great!

My module is 30% essay, 70% exam.

I got a B+ in the essay, so that's a grade point of 1.08 in the module so far right? (0.3*3.6)

So, if I get an E in the exam it'd be 0.7*1.6 and then my overall grade point would be 2.2, yeah?

So, I'd pass the module with a D?

[Jackass]

Yup!