There has been a lot of speculation about the effects of the 5%/30% new grading scheme implemented by the faculty of science. Some people are ecstatic that they don’t have to study anymore, while others wonder if they could “[keep] original grading scheme as an option” or else the “new grading scheme will ruin their chances of getting into their major”.
With the COVID-19 crisis and classes being moved online, the science faculty at UBC has decided to make final exams for all courses worth either 30% or 5%, whichever maximizes one’s total course grade. The rest of the weightings would be scaled accordingly by the professor, but clearly midterms/assignments will now occupy a greater chunk of the marks.
It seems to be a pretty sensible decision made on the faculty’s side. First of all, it takes the stress off the students (imagine having bad internet connection and doing your 60% final exam), and it also mitigates the impact of academic dishonesty to some extent (the final won’t be worth enough so that cheating will significantly boost your mark).
However, some students are finding this marking scheme very unfavorable, such as those who did poorly on their midterms and were hoping to get a good mark in final exams. Before you say someone who does bad on midterms will not do good in finals either, let’s consider study time: during the term, you might not have a lot of time juggling studying for midterms and regularly scheduled classes and homework, whereas during finals, you get > 1 week to study. So unfortunately for these people (yes myself included), the grading scheme might not work very well.
Since the grading scheme is good for some, while bad for others, what does the overall picture look like? Should I expect class averages and 2nd year specializations averages to be higher or lower?
Mark MacLean, the faculty member of the department of mathematics, conducted some analysis1. He used past data from year 1 math classes and calculated what the curve would look like under the new grading scheme. His results are shown as follows:
So it seems that the class average increased by ~10%. Well that’s the prediction, case closed. But not quite.
Although the statistics are great and do show an increase in averages, we see some unique circumstances today that will affect this data. One of the dominant factors is students' mindset towards a 5%/30% grading scheme. Because these statistics were based on past years, where students assumed that their final exam marks would be worth the major chunk of their grades, they probably studied reasonably well. But if you told these same students that their final would only be worth 5%, they would probably won't be inclined to study as much, therefore, resulting in lower marks than they would normally receive.
Another factor is the shift from physical lectures to online. Since online lectures are recorded anyways, it seems logical to conclude that students will be less likely to attend class at regularly scheduled hours, or listen to lecture recordings afterwards, if at all. And with the constant bombardment of news and changes in the world around us, its even harder to concentrate.
I think that’s one of the biggest reasons that averages for this term will NOT increase even though the grading scheme is statistically more favorable. Nobody wants to listen to hours and hours of online lectures at home, nevermind studying for a 5% final. The data collected on overall averages is not an accurate representation of the data for this term; specifically, raw marks will be lower. As a result, applying the new grading scheme on these lower averages will result in more or less the same averages as before.
As an example consider my Earth Sciences course. Even though the final exam was entirely open book, and the questions were mostly straight-forward (memorization questions designed for a closed book exam), the average was actually 71%. Compare this to our midterm average of 76% which was around the same difficulty and a closed book exam. Although this course is the only one to have released exam results, I do believe that other courses will follow the same pattern. But that’s not a promise, don’t come back and sue me if they don’t.
And can I just say that the Dean just ended all the preparatory companies like BYC and Prep101 with the new grading scheme?
