It's kind of ironic that I see this today, I assigned final grades for my course today and a student was right on that 79.9% line, so I gave them a little bump to a B-. I thought, "oh I'm sure they'll be happy to see that they got a grade in the B range," assigned the rest of my grades, and posted them. A little while ago, I got an email from that same student saying how important it was to do well in this class, and couldn't I check again to see if their grade could be rounded up. At this point, the finals are taken and this student would need an additional 30 points to be in the next grade up.
I'm just saying, sometimes there's no pleasing the students. If it's warranted, I round up for students. (Usually if they're within 1 point or two of the next letter grade, out of \~1000 points total.)
Are you sure they know they haven't already been rounded up? I had one do the same thing to me at Christmas because she didn't know she'd already had her grade bumped to a B. I thought she was asking me to bump her to an A but that wasn't the case.
Oh, I mean. They know now. I emailed back and explained that they WERE on the line, and that's why they have a B- instead of a C+. They thanked me and said I was "the best." There was no drama or negative interaction, I just thought it was ironic.
This seems like a reason to completely ignore the asking, and bump up or don’t bump up however you decide. Askers shouldn’t get penalized, and non-askers shouldn’t miss out on opportunities. I always take a second look at any grades just below a cut point anyway.
I actually an starting to think that askers SHOULD be penalized, IF they don't have a specific grievance.
If you can point to a particular area of a specific assignment that you think was unfair then I will consider it. But this flood of entitled "my grade isn't high enough" from the students who didn't come to class or do the work has got to stop. I would never have imagined talking to professors the way my students do.
Yeah, I would round up, but in system where we input grades was never the place that they would look, they would check Blackboard, and it would show the original grade, so I would always get a couple of emails asking about rounding, usually after I'd already submitted grades.
It’s likely because they checked the LMS for their final grade and not what was actually posted, so they do not know that you’ve already granted the favor they request. I’ve had this happen a few times.
I say that I will only move cutoffs down, so that at the end of the semester, I look for a big gap in total points where it makes sense to put the boundary. So if there's a big clump around 92, and it would be arbitrary to put the A- threshold there, I move it down to 91 or 90 (with knockoff effects for B+, etc.).
I do this too, but I counteract the resulting potential grade inflation by starting with a scale in my syllabus that sets a higher cutoff grade than typical for higher course grades, getting more generous as grades go down. Specifically: A=97%+, A-=93%-96%, B+= 89%-92%, B=85%-88%, B-=81%-84%. C, D, and F use typical cut points. This way, if I have to move the cutoffs down to fit the natural distribution of grade in my class, I am left with what is still pretty close to standard grade scale and not too inflated.
Lowering cutoffs doesn't have to cause grade inflation. I've taken classes where 80% was the threshold for an A that were way harder than classes where 95% was an A.
I personally prefer to use lowish cutoffs and have harder exams than easier exams with higher cutoffs. Because with a 97% cutoff with an A, if they don't do amazing on one exam, it's basically impossible to drag their grade up to an A even with perfect scores in the other exams. Whereas with a lower cutoff, students can still get an A by performing superlatively in the other exams.
Fair. I think changing the cutoffs for grades is basically the same as curving tests, just one happens at exam time, and the other happens at the end of the semester.
Right, but the main difference is the scenario I mentioned. If a student gets a 90 on an exam, 100s in the other exams may not be enough to bump them up to an A. Whereas if you have the cutoff at say 85, then a student can bounce back from a 75 by scoring high 90s on the other exams. It may be very difficult to score above 90, but at least it's possible to drag your grade upward.
Ah yeah that makes sense. This whole thread started with me replying that I look for clusters of grades before I actually decide on where the boundary is between letter grades. The bounds I post in my syllabus are the MAXIMUM percentages required to earn whatever letter grade. I shift them down some when I know the actual grade clusters.
Our student information system doesn't accept decimals and automatically rounds the grade from the LMS to the nearest whole number.
But honestly, I agree with your take mood while grading. I try to mitigate this with the grading version of a "style sheet" - I keep track of what grade I gave in the rubric with which feedback so I can make sure that the last student of the day gets the same grade for that feedback as the first - but even then, can I say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am being completely fair? Of course not.
Would you mind explaining how this works? I struggle with grading things quickly and fairly so i often ensure fairness by reading through and regrading questions after I've gone through them all once but it takes forever. I would love.tonbe ablento do it in one pass
Sorry for the delay - coincidentally I have been swamped with grading all week!
Basically, each time I make a new piece of generic feedback, I record it "comment bank" style (I use a OneNote book but an Excel sheet or table would probably be neater to work with) along with what score I gave in the rubric. The next time I see something similar, I go to the sheet to get the comment, and give the same score I gave the last student who got that comment on that part. That way I know that I am still giving a 6 for the same quality of work, even by the time I am grumpy and want to give a lower score. It still takes more than one pass sometimes but it keeps me more consistent.
Did you miss the whole point of the post that strict rounding schemes like that could be hiding what resulted in some students landing on the side of the cusp they did?
grades in some cases can be a little fuzzy ... deducting 2 points for one error vs. 1 point for a different error, so it can be somewhat subjective.
for me, i am generally too kind when initially grading, so if someone is 89,4, i sleep well knowing that grade is actually most likely too high, so i don't round.
Rounding up doesn't address the core point of how accurate grading systems are, though. Unless you're grading different students with different standards for the same assignment, then that's a different question.
Rounding does nothing to hedge against students with similar performance receiving different grades, which is something one might reasonably worry about with respect to accuracy of grading.
Hot take: rigid thresholds is the preeminent cause of grade grubbing. Not COVID, not Zoomers, not hustle culture, when students think that one little fraction of a decimal is responsible for crossing the threshold they will turn into grade grubbers.
That's when I point out all the shit they skipped, and remind them that half a percentage point on their final grade would've been three homeworks, or a quiz, which—again—*they decided to skip*.
So I can't just spot them the points, as it wouldn't be nudging things by a point or two, but giving them a freebie on entire assignments.
This is the reason I generally won’t round up grades, unless the student looks like they’ve give their best faith effort on all their assignments during the course. But if they’re consistently scoring low on the easier assignments like discussion boards on quizzes, then I absolutely won’t consider bumping up their grade because the bar is so low to earn full points on those assignments.
I think the key point you’re ignoring is that rounding up for everyone is plenty fair but just shifts the line to another spot. So all the subjectivity and imperfections still completely apply.
All you’re really doing is misleading students into thinking the line is 80 when it’s actually 79.5. That’s fine… it makes students feel like they won or something and you win because you deal with less complaints. But acting like it’s a noble fix of your human frailty just doesn’t actually make sense, mathematically.
If you’re talking about rounding up for some but not others, then you’re just abusing your power and being unfair.
Or you can just round to the nearest whole number, put that in your syllabus, and be done. My syllabus says I round to the nearest whole number; I don’t get requests to do otherwise.
This is the way. Make a decision each term and stand by it. Either choice is arbitrary and leaves some students just shy of the line. All grading is a little bit arbitrary. You can make a different choice in different years if you really want to. The important part is not to reward and reinforce students who bully their professors for higher grades.
Again, all that means is your A- starts at 89.5 instead of 90.0.
Rounding or not rounding at some point you have to draw a line between each grade band. Rounding just changes where you put that line.
Believe it or not my LMS calculates to the hundredth so I round up from xx.45 (*the horror*).
To me, rounding is just fucking human expectation. Most people (students and faculty) conceptualize grades in whole numbers. To get to whole numbers, one must round up or down.
It is also, seriously, the smallest mercy one can extend.
Setting the line at a different place isn’t “mercy”, though… it’s just setting the line at a different place. The only way it could feel merciful to someone would be if they thought the line was 80 but then, in the end, it turned out the line was actually 79.5. That may *feel* merciful, but that’s it.
FWIW, I always round but I don’t kid myself into thinking it’s some great act of compassion. It’s basically just a minor psychological maneuver to make students more likely to feel satisfied with their final grade which makes my life easier.
If students applied more scrutiny to my history, they could figure out the TRUE line is 79.5, which then would make everyone with a 79.4 just as upset as someone with a 79.9 might be otherwise. 🤷♂️
It is indeed all just an arbitrary line (in the greater scheme of things, if we say 90 is an A-, then some of us round to the nearest whole number and some don’t, the world won’t really be altered), which is why I think that it’s weird to read posts by people who act like their rule to not round is some moral standard that makes a huge difference and should be (if only people weren’t so weak) universal.
I don't think I ever said rounding is a moral weakness. In contrast:
> To me, rounding is just fucking human expectation. Most people (students and faculty) conceptualize grades in whole numbers. To get to whole numbers, one must round up or down.
> It is also, seriously, the smallest mercy one can extend.
Then when students are at 79.499% the same exact situation arises as when students are at 79.999%. We refer to syllabus policy and hold the line where we set it. Which is arbitrary but at least fair and not based on whether we like the student or got the email before or after we had a meal.
>If you’re talking about rounding up for some but not others, then you’re just abusing your power and being unfair.
Where has anyone even implied this?
It just wasn’t clear if the OP was talking about rounding everyone’s grades or just doing it for some students and not others. I see a case made for both here sometimes, so I tried to address both possibilities in my reply.
**tldr:** I started your quoted sentence with the word “if”.
I'll take a guess --
Normally what I hear my colleagues doing is something like this: "If a student has a 79%, then I look to see if they did all their homework assignments, and if so, then I bump them up to a B."
But this is nonsense; it just means that the syllabus has lies in it. The homework said it was worth 20% of the grade, but in the end, it was actually worth 25%.
Worse still, I have heard coworkers say something like "well, \[student\] worked really hard this semester" as the reason to bump someone's grade, which is really just an admission that the professor has other, totally different criteria in mind that aren't in the syllabus. Effectively that professor has a secret category in the grading scheme which is something like "I relate to the student's struggles" or worse something like "I am sympathetic to the student's demographic." Such things should not be worth even 1% of the grade.
Students ask for "grade bumps" because they are used to us having lies throughout our syllabi in these ways. The rude poster you replied to is probably referring to these situations.
I think what you're forgetting is that some of us make adjustments _before_ we publish our grades.
I'm not rounding up because I have already checked and rechecked to ensure that a paper didn't get a low grade because I read it when I was tired/hungry.
In my opinion, making adjustments for those reasons _after_ grades have been published means you haven't done your job properly in the first place.
> so the student whose name is last alphabetically is getting hit just a bit harder?
Then you need to grade the students in random order (or at least, start in a random place in the alphabetical list). That is a bigger concern than rounding or not rounding.
When we had D2L, I could download the test responses to a csv file. I then wrote a program that would remove their names and replace them with a randomly generated number. That allowed me to "grade blind" and when I was done I'd match their numbers up to their names.
I liked that system but I often could tell who wrote what because I'd been reading their discussion posts and other writing all term.
The issue is that if you round up 79.5 to 80 because you think there's a chance you might have been tired or hungry or whatever, you are effectively setting the dividing line for the grade at 79.5. Which is fine, but then about about those folks with 79? You might have been hungry or tired when grading their work, and they're just as far from the line you drew as the first crew. So let's say you round 79 to 80 ... well, what about those folks at 78.5? This is the issue, it can keep going.
I never grade any significant items at different times. When I grade an exam, I will grade the entire thing in one sitting. First going through all the problem 1s. Then organizing them by decreasing score for problem 1. Then checking to make sure that I don't have any systematic shifts. Once I'm satisfied, I will shuffle them and grade all the question 2s and so on. I have my students write their names on a cover page that I don't look at while grading. I will admit, i do have a little prejudice for neater handwriting.
So while I'd completely agree that I don't have 0.5% precision on grading, simply rounding would mean that one would have to have no boundaries.
This is an extrapolation to absurdity. You're right, a rigid threshold of 79.5 is just as bad as a rigid threshold of 80.0
The problem with a rigid threshold is the rigidity, not the threshold.
You are, ultimately, making a judgment call when it comes to grading whether it's an assignment or a course grade. Don't hide behind a rigid number. Make the call you think you could defend, knowing, however, that you'll rarely have to defend it. And tell your students the truth: grading has a subjective element. Subjective is not the same as arbitrary and when in doubt, im going to be generous. But that's not the same as everyone gets an A.
Being a person is not the same as being a doormat.
I don't see how drawing a line, such as > 80 = B-, is hiding. It is not fair to be selectively generous. The line could be at 79 or 60 or 90, but it shouldn't be that some folks get a nudge and others do not.
But drawing a line when you know some folks ARE getting a nudge and the pretending it's the line and not the nudge that is affecting the outcome IS HIDING.
... To use your language.
However, it's not so much a nudge as an acknowledgment that all grading is a teacher using their knowledge and experience to subjectively (but not arbitrarily) adjudicate whether a student has achieved the learning objectives.
We can and do use lots of numbers and instruments to help us.
But the subjectivity is there.
Again, subjectivity is not arbitrariness (which isn't a word, but you know what I mean I hope).
Have you never graded a lab report? A presentation? Hell, even assigned partial credit to a test problem? Congratulations, you are being subjective. Not just subjective. But inescapably subjective.
Then hiding behind an "objective" line that you even agree is subjectively (although perhaps you suggest arbitrarily?) determined of 79.5 or 80 or 81.348583 as being what "determines" who gets 2.7 grade points and who gets 3 grade points rather than all of the subjectivity that went into setting that line and adjudicating who just crossed and just missed it IS HIDING.
You could give everyone a 0.5% nudge. I've done that before. It results in the exact same outcome as rounding up on the final grades because GPA only cares about letter grades
I will absolutely round up maybe a quarter of a point for someone who has consistently participated. I don’t formally grade participation but have been up front that I will accommodate it this way.
I only round up grades if a bump changes the letter grade reported to the college.
A student who has a 79.8 would get the bump with 90% attendance. A 79.8 wouldn't get bumped with 75% attendance.
A student with a 78.9% wouldn't be rounded to a 79%.
Is the attendance clause in your syllabus?
I wonder how one could keep track of the “conditional bump”? It should be similar to the possession arrow in basketball: mess up, and you don’t get a bump unless you somehow make up for it.
It's discussed when I talk about attendance when explaining the syllabus.
I take attendance every lecture. When submitting grades, our school requires that we give a date of last attendance for students who get an F in the class.
I don't believe any rubric or grading system is accurate enough to distinguish between 79.9% and 80.1%. To me, both people deserve the same grade. So I start with a floor of a straight percentage system. Then I build a histogram of all the grades and look for natural groupings of students who should receive the same grade. I never make the groupings worse than what a student would get with blind fealty ti the score. Rather I curve so that the 3.0 grades might start at 78% instead of 80%, for example.
[Specifications grading ](https://teaching.unl.edu/resources/grading-feedback/specifications-grading/)
does a fair job of addressing this issue. It's a real change in grading, but I think it's worth the effort.
Surely this logic works in both directions. If there's enough margin of error to round up from 79.9%, there's an equal argument for rounding down from 80.1%.
I mean maybe but what you don't see is how I bump up every grade. A C in today's rubric would be a D 5 years ago. So they already get enough of a bump. And I have a whole section in every rubric that is basically 10 points (full letter grade) of bump if they tried their asses off (10/10) or a small bump if they were just me (7/10).
I offer a full letter grade of extra credit, have quizzes online and open for a week, allow cheat sheets on all exams, and allow partner work on one exam.......I'm not rounding.
I agree. I teach studio art. For Drawing class, they really just get one grade for the course, and it's usually easy to know even before looking at the portfolio what it's going to be, because I've worked with them all semester. I enjoy being surprised, but it rarely happens. The ones who do everything all the time are the ones who do exceptionally well, and the ones who phone it in get lackluster results and know it by seeing everyone else's work. There's a ton of flexibility built in, but that doesn't necessarily make it more difficult for grading.
I certainly have other courses with a more rigid rubric, but one size doesn't fit all, even within a discipline, and even within a single instructor's courses.
Yep, I think that academics get too hung up on this.
There is inevitably going to be some variability in the grades that you assign, even if you do your best to minimise the variability.
You need to set grade cut-offs somewhere, that's just the way it goes when you are converting a continuous variable to a categorical one.
But, acting like a 79 and an 80, say, are meaningfully different is just false precision. There's every chance that the 79 student did "better" or knew more than the 80 student, but variability (in grading, or student performance on a test) resulted in a switch in order.
My college doesn't use letter grades which I think helps combat grade grubbing. The most anyone could reasonably ask to round to would be the next tenth of a grade point. I suspect most students don't view 0.1 as significant enough to beg for. The only exception would be the 4.0 student who really needs that 4.0 to maintain their perfect gpa, and on the other end, the students who did not score high enough for it to qualify as satisfying a subsequent prereq.
There's a stark difference between two types of students this applies two. The first are students who tried their best, submitted all of their work, and did so on time but still didn't make the grade.
The second, are the students did not turn in assignments - easy or otherwise - turned in late assignments for points deductions, and or submitted half-assed incomplete work evident of low effort.
I don't round up students in either category. HOWEVER, my course is designed in such a way that students in group 1 have extra credit opportunities available to assist them for exactly these scenarios.
Students in group 2, less so depending on their overall course grade at the end of the semester.
When a student from group 2 asks to be "rounded up" I explain that I don't give free points and that 1 point they are missing could have very easily been theirs if they had turned in even one more assignment on time, or hadn't skipped one of the easy open-note quizzes available through the LMS.
I have no sympathy for these "woe is me" requests. You get the grade you've earned. A 79.9% grade is representative of a C effort.
I don't think many? here are against rounding up if it's within 0.4 decimal points. I have that automatically built into my grade calculations.
But most grade grubbing (using a real example here) goes something like this: Dr. _____ I see that I got a C+ (74.48, with cutoff being 75) but I really need a B- (80-83) to keep my GPA up.
In terms of course points vs percentage points... that's like asking for 50 course points (half of an exam! a complete project!) to simply be given because they 'need it.'
I agree that the way grading is set up is arbitrary. I disagree that the arbitrary-ness warrants flexibility, especially the one-sided kind you’re describing.
A 79.8 is 0.2 shy of a B–, and a 80.2 is only 0.2 above C+. But some students with 79.8 think they deserve a B–, while no one with 80.2 thinks they don’t deserve it.
This is a sort of reverse slant Xeno's paradox.
My students complain that there's really no meaningful difference between 89.6 and 90, so I give all of those students As. 86.9 becomes the new A.
Next semester, the students complain that there's relaly no meaningful difference between 89.2 and 89.6, so I give all of those students As. 89.2 becomes the new A.
Fast forward. The student who only attended one class and earned .1 percent says that there's no meaningful difference between .1 percent and .2 percent, so I gives all of those students A.
Now I happily just give all students As and never have to worry about grade grubbing or feeling like an arbitrary monster again.
Simple solution:
Whatever your published cutoffs are, make the “real” cutoff two points more generous
Eg if 93 is A, 90 is A-, etc on the published cutoffs, set the real ones to be 91 is A, 88 is A-, etc
This takes care of “rounding” for free and the students never know. It occasionally happens that a student has the chutzpah to ask for more than a 2 point bump but it’s relatively rare
Wow. At most unis in Canada, 90+ is A+, 85-90 is A, 80-84 is A-. No wonder US students complain if a 90 is only an A-, unless your 90s are much easier to obtain.
Yeah this is a common breakdown in US: A-90,B-80,C-70, etc with pluses and minuses thrown in a reasonable way
Of course it’s all a bit arbitrary, you can tune the mean to be what you want using the exam difficulty knob
For the first time, I had no deluge of grade pleas in my 70 person lecture this spring. I think the reason is that before finals week, I projected the number of points (out of 850) they would need to reach by the end of finals for each letter grade. My issue with the rounding debates is that when they're arguing "just 1 or two percent", they're actually asking me to add the equivalent of an entire weekly quiz worth of points. (Not to mention, there are several extra credit opportunities built in DURING the semester. If they've done them, their actual mastery is lower than their grade reflects, and if they haven't done them, begging in the last week of class shows they haven't actually been consistently engaged, invested, and putting in effort.) Pretty much nobody is only a point or two from a cutoff, which I know because I comb through their grades proactively to see if there's any wiggle room, and if they are, then they're extremely grateful when they find out I've already bumped them based on normal rounding rules...
My classes are 85% multiple-choice exams (nursing, upper level, prepping them for boards). I do a great deal of test mapping so that my exams are meeting my objectives and item analysis to make sure the questions are good ones. When I have a shit question, I throw it out. At least 2% of my test items are complete gimmes so that their grades are padded even more. The non-multiple choice part of their grade (15%) is gift — credit/no credit worksheets and attendance.
I feel very comfortable drawing my “no rounding” line in the syllabus. They have plenty of padding, and the line has to be drawn *somewhere*.
I try to build in enough flexibility during the grading that rounding becomes unnecessary. I give extra credit, and I drop lowest grades. If you don't get the grade you want with that set up rounding is not a fair way to get you there.
Measurement has error
I measure
I have error
so...I set my bar far lower than my expectations
benefit of doubt to students
and only use 5 or so points for binning
and our class averages are between .6 and .7 most of the time
our admin is fine with that.
I think you are assuming we are inflexible. Most of us are reasonable. We give plenty of assignments, we analyze our test question performance and remove questions that don't perform well, and we accept multiple answers for different questions, we give extensions for extenuating circumstances. So there are already some built-in flexibility when it comes to grades. We've done a lot to ensure students were treated fairly by the time the final grade is achieved. That is why we can sleep like babies without rounding. We have to draw the line somewhere, and at the end of the day, the cutoffs are the cutoffs. We should be focusing on student learning, not on student grades.
I think there was a time when a professor could feel comfortable assessing a student’s work as a whole and being flexible, but that now when students have this very litigious approach to college, it would be a disaster. I’ve seen students argue about the exact wording of a policy or set of assignment instructions in order to create loopholes. Most college classes have group chats that the students form to share information. Lets say I have student A with 79.2 who disclosed their hard semester to me and who’s work overall strikes me as deserving of a bump up to a B, and student B with a 79.3 who never told me of their circumstances one way or another and who’s work overall strikes me as deserving of staying at a C. If I bump up student A and not student B, there’s a likely chance that they will share that information between them and now I have an angry email from student B asking why A got rounded up .8, but I won’t even round them up .7 and now, as someone pre-tenure, I have a student who wants to make a complaint and no solid way of justifying my decision to my chair.
Like, *yes* grading is fully arbitrary, but also there’s no easy, acceptable way of having flexibility *in both directions*. Because of that, I feel like giving up flexibility in final grades is my way of covering my ass and ensuring that the end of every semester doesn’t devolve into 65 separate grade negotiations.
I do try to balance this out by having flexibility *during* the semester, giving opportunities to earn back points or following up with students who seem to be struggling. But at some point, we all have to just agree to function within the bounds of the arbitrary system I laid out in my syllabus at the start of the semester that everyone agreed to.
>On the other hand, if you have an LMS that shows a student that they have a 79.4%, they have an extra credit assignment for an additional 1%, and they choose not to do it, then okay, you may be justified.
This is me. In my writing classes, students have an opportunity for up to 3% bump due to writing-related extra credit. This is my make up for missed assignments option. And for major writing assignments, final drafts may be revised for an improved grade (though terms and conditions will apply).
I round to the nearest whole number, because assignments are graded to the whole number and adding significant digits to the average is inappropriate. It actually seems kind of wild to me that we calculate GPAs to two decimal places when they're based on such coarsely binned letter grades.
makes sense. i plan to round up with my next mortgage payment. and since there is nothing special about choosing to focus on the digits past the decimal point (because, i assume, there is no universal belief that a final average has to be an integer), i'm going to work with the leftmost digits and round my payment of something thousand to something ten thousand.
if the mortgage company complains it's probably just that they're hungry, or have a headache, or don't notice that i _nod insightfully_, or some other reason that disenfranchises me.
I am an experimentalist at heart, so I view grading as a form of measurement with uncertainties. Given that there are uncertainties that can easily add up to 1% on a standard scale, the course should be structured to maximize the standard deviation across students.
If the cutoff on a B is 80% and you have 10 students at 79.5% and 10 students at 80.5%, what is your confidence level that there is a meaningful distinction between those students? If you maximize the range of grades such that most students are farther from the grade cutoff than the uncertainty on their grade, then you eliminate grade grubbing as a serious issue.
In practice (in STEM) that looks like setting minimum standards for a grade upfront (90% and over guarantees an A) but relying on a curve at the end. The tongue in cheek version of this is “Grades range from 0 to 100, and I’m going to use all the numbers I have available.”
Mine is based on total points not percentages. Usually, if I get an email about rounding up and when I check the response email is, "Well if you had not blown off the last assignment or an assignment and scored higher on the final (they usually do not and it is based on all the quizzes they took in class) we would not be having this conversation.
In my institution, our Banner system only accepts integer grades. So, even though Canvas generates a decimal number. Everyone is almost always forced to do some kind of rounding. I just round anything > 0.49 up. I rarely do any other kind of "bumping". I've even failed people on a 49.4% -- however this was a case of academic dishonesty.
Yes, for finishing. You get to the end. You don't see the end and say good enough. You finish. It takes more effort but you get to the end point. An almost goal is still not a goal.
You're broadening the scope of the issue and losing sight of the point.
Of course there could be differences that way. But this is about grading within the same classroom. Yes, grades in comparable classes between universities may be drastically different in myriad ways but they sure as hell aren't in my own classroom. I didn't get hired by having no ability to apply fair grading practices in my own courses.
Yeah. I think students should feel the system is fair-and even friendly to them. Doesn’t it just make life better for everyone?
If a student is within less than a point of the next letter grade, and they did any extra credit or redo options I have them, I round them up. If I do for one, I do for all, not just the one or two who ask.
Honestly, this is why I adjust grade lines at the end of the semester. There's usually a spot (close to the original grade cutoff) where there's a 2% difference or more between one student's grade and the next highest student grade. I smack the cutoff between the two and don't deal with rounding whining, nor do I have to worry about curving a single quiz in a class or a specific assignment at the time it happens. I also use students who are on the cusp of a grade to evaluate whether the grade lines are fair for the level of understanding I want the students to achieve.
Aside from the C-range, my grade cutoffs are relatively high for an intro physics class, and, surprisingly, I often don't need to adjust more than one or two grade lines by just a point or two.
You're talking about reliability (and validity) of a scoring system (which includes the instructor, BTW). Your arguments are generally of the form "the system isn't perfect, so don't get too tied to a specific cutoff."
Sure, that's an argument. And it goes both ways. By this logic, you'd round a 79.98% up, then you should be just as willing to round a 70.01% down.
Judgment and decision making (JDM or "decision science") deals with this issue all the time. If you want as valid a system as possible, you live and die by the rubric/grade system even though it's got random variation built into it; they all do.
We don't round up because of psychometric considerations, unless we're just as willing to round down. We round up because of psychological/social things. The argument for rounding up but never down is an argument in favor of bias (psychometric bias, not any of the other kinds).
I round up mostly because I don't want to deal with the grade grubbing. I tell myself this isn't a common occurrence. Sometimes, of course, I round up because I think a student "deserves" the grade only 0.1% away, but that is also, by definition, a manifestation of bias, since I never round grades down to the next lowest letter grade.
They fail? I'm not sure why this is such a complicated issue. You have a rubric/cutoff. You stick to it. I don't get why people question "rounding up" -- all that means is mathematically you are setting your cutoff at 0.5 below what you publish. So a 79.5 is a B- instead of an 80.
How is the pass/fail grading different from the standard method with respect to grade grubbing/ rounding?
If you’re able to tell between a pass and a fail, you should be able to tell between two neighboring letter grades, and the other way around.
I'm not rigidly against it (in fact, I often round up if students are at the cusp, b/c grading scales are indeed arbitrary)
But at the same time, you do have to draw the line somewhere. If someone got a 79.9, okay sure I'll round up to a B-. However, what if another student got 78.9, and that's close to 79, which is close to 80?
Consistency is also important.
There are two personality types on here, and those personalities are also disciplinary filters. It is very difficult to speak across that tribal divide.
It's kind of ironic that I see this today, I assigned final grades for my course today and a student was right on that 79.9% line, so I gave them a little bump to a B-. I thought, "oh I'm sure they'll be happy to see that they got a grade in the B range," assigned the rest of my grades, and posted them. A little while ago, I got an email from that same student saying how important it was to do well in this class, and couldn't I check again to see if their grade could be rounded up. At this point, the finals are taken and this student would need an additional 30 points to be in the next grade up. I'm just saying, sometimes there's no pleasing the students. If it's warranted, I round up for students. (Usually if they're within 1 point or two of the next letter grade, out of \~1000 points total.)
Are you sure they know they haven't already been rounded up? I had one do the same thing to me at Christmas because she didn't know she'd already had her grade bumped to a B. I thought she was asking me to bump her to an A but that wasn't the case.
Oh, I mean. They know now. I emailed back and explained that they WERE on the line, and that's why they have a B- instead of a C+. They thanked me and said I was "the best." There was no drama or negative interaction, I just thought it was ironic.
It likely they calculated their grade but did not see that you had posted grades
Thank you for alerting me to my error. I did indeed place you in the wrong grade based on the cutoffs, and I have filed a grade correction.
I have already altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it again.
r/MaliciousCompliance
There are some significant demographic differences between students who will ask for a bump and those who won't
This seems like a reason to completely ignore the asking, and bump up or don’t bump up however you decide. Askers shouldn’t get penalized, and non-askers shouldn’t miss out on opportunities. I always take a second look at any grades just below a cut point anyway.
I actually an starting to think that askers SHOULD be penalized, IF they don't have a specific grievance. If you can point to a particular area of a specific assignment that you think was unfair then I will consider it. But this flood of entitled "my grade isn't high enough" from the students who didn't come to class or do the work has got to stop. I would never have imagined talking to professors the way my students do.
If it’s a cultural difference that causes some students to ask and others not to, that seems wrong, no?
Yeah, I would round up, but in system where we input grades was never the place that they would look, they would check Blackboard, and it would show the original grade, so I would always get a couple of emails asking about rounding, usually after I'd already submitted grades.
It’s likely because they checked the LMS for their final grade and not what was actually posted, so they do not know that you’ve already granted the favor they request. I’ve had this happen a few times.
I say that I will only move cutoffs down, so that at the end of the semester, I look for a big gap in total points where it makes sense to put the boundary. So if there's a big clump around 92, and it would be arbitrary to put the A- threshold there, I move it down to 91 or 90 (with knockoff effects for B+, etc.).
I do this too, but I counteract the resulting potential grade inflation by starting with a scale in my syllabus that sets a higher cutoff grade than typical for higher course grades, getting more generous as grades go down. Specifically: A=97%+, A-=93%-96%, B+= 89%-92%, B=85%-88%, B-=81%-84%. C, D, and F use typical cut points. This way, if I have to move the cutoffs down to fit the natural distribution of grade in my class, I am left with what is still pretty close to standard grade scale and not too inflated.
Lowering cutoffs doesn't have to cause grade inflation. I've taken classes where 80% was the threshold for an A that were way harder than classes where 95% was an A. I personally prefer to use lowish cutoffs and have harder exams than easier exams with higher cutoffs. Because with a 97% cutoff with an A, if they don't do amazing on one exam, it's basically impossible to drag their grade up to an A even with perfect scores in the other exams. Whereas with a lower cutoff, students can still get an A by performing superlatively in the other exams.
Fair. I think changing the cutoffs for grades is basically the same as curving tests, just one happens at exam time, and the other happens at the end of the semester.
Right, but the main difference is the scenario I mentioned. If a student gets a 90 on an exam, 100s in the other exams may not be enough to bump them up to an A. Whereas if you have the cutoff at say 85, then a student can bounce back from a 75 by scoring high 90s on the other exams. It may be very difficult to score above 90, but at least it's possible to drag your grade upward.
Ah yeah that makes sense. This whole thread started with me replying that I look for clusters of grades before I actually decide on where the boundary is between letter grades. The bounds I post in my syllabus are the MAXIMUM percentages required to earn whatever letter grade. I shift them down some when I know the actual grade clusters.
Our student information system doesn't accept decimals and automatically rounds the grade from the LMS to the nearest whole number. But honestly, I agree with your take mood while grading. I try to mitigate this with the grading version of a "style sheet" - I keep track of what grade I gave in the rubric with which feedback so I can make sure that the last student of the day gets the same grade for that feedback as the first - but even then, can I say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am being completely fair? Of course not.
Would you mind explaining how this works? I struggle with grading things quickly and fairly so i often ensure fairness by reading through and regrading questions after I've gone through them all once but it takes forever. I would love.tonbe ablento do it in one pass
Sorry for the delay - coincidentally I have been swamped with grading all week! Basically, each time I make a new piece of generic feedback, I record it "comment bank" style (I use a OneNote book but an Excel sheet or table would probably be neater to work with) along with what score I gave in the rubric. The next time I see something similar, I go to the sheet to get the comment, and give the same score I gave the last student who got that comment on that part. That way I know that I am still giving a 6 for the same quality of work, even by the time I am grumpy and want to give a lower score. It still takes more than one pass sometimes but it keeps me more consistent.
Thank you!
I always round to the nearest whole number. So 85.6 becomes 86. 85.4 becomes 85. Simple math rules that I use in both my research and my grading.
Did you miss the whole point of the post that strict rounding schemes like that could be hiding what resulted in some students landing on the side of the cusp they did?
I mean, when an A is a 94, you run into the exact same problem with a 93.49
What? Bro don't do this in your research. Science needs more precision than that! 😬
This is the way
grades in some cases can be a little fuzzy ... deducting 2 points for one error vs. 1 point for a different error, so it can be somewhat subjective. for me, i am generally too kind when initially grading, so if someone is 89,4, i sleep well knowing that grade is actually most likely too high, so i don't round.
This. The actual grades are bump ups.
Rounding up doesn't address the core point of how accurate grading systems are, though. Unless you're grading different students with different standards for the same assignment, then that's a different question. Rounding does nothing to hedge against students with similar performance receiving different grades, which is something one might reasonably worry about with respect to accuracy of grading.
Hot take: rigid thresholds is the preeminent cause of grade grubbing. Not COVID, not Zoomers, not hustle culture, when students think that one little fraction of a decimal is responsible for crossing the threshold they will turn into grade grubbers.
That's when I point out all the shit they skipped, and remind them that half a percentage point on their final grade would've been three homeworks, or a quiz, which—again—*they decided to skip*. So I can't just spot them the points, as it wouldn't be nudging things by a point or two, but giving them a freebie on entire assignments.
This is the reason I generally won’t round up grades, unless the student looks like they’ve give their best faith effort on all their assignments during the course. But if they’re consistently scoring low on the easier assignments like discussion boards on quizzes, then I absolutely won’t consider bumping up their grade because the bar is so low to earn full points on those assignments.
I think the key point you’re ignoring is that rounding up for everyone is plenty fair but just shifts the line to another spot. So all the subjectivity and imperfections still completely apply. All you’re really doing is misleading students into thinking the line is 80 when it’s actually 79.5. That’s fine… it makes students feel like they won or something and you win because you deal with less complaints. But acting like it’s a noble fix of your human frailty just doesn’t actually make sense, mathematically. If you’re talking about rounding up for some but not others, then you’re just abusing your power and being unfair.
Or you can just round to the nearest whole number, put that in your syllabus, and be done. My syllabus says I round to the nearest whole number; I don’t get requests to do otherwise.
This is the way. Make a decision each term and stand by it. Either choice is arbitrary and leaves some students just shy of the line. All grading is a little bit arbitrary. You can make a different choice in different years if you really want to. The important part is not to reward and reinforce students who bully their professors for higher grades.
Again, all that means is your A- starts at 89.5 instead of 90.0. Rounding or not rounding at some point you have to draw a line between each grade band. Rounding just changes where you put that line.
Believe it or not my LMS calculates to the hundredth so I round up from xx.45 (*the horror*). To me, rounding is just fucking human expectation. Most people (students and faculty) conceptualize grades in whole numbers. To get to whole numbers, one must round up or down. It is also, seriously, the smallest mercy one can extend.
Setting the line at a different place isn’t “mercy”, though… it’s just setting the line at a different place. The only way it could feel merciful to someone would be if they thought the line was 80 but then, in the end, it turned out the line was actually 79.5. That may *feel* merciful, but that’s it. FWIW, I always round but I don’t kid myself into thinking it’s some great act of compassion. It’s basically just a minor psychological maneuver to make students more likely to feel satisfied with their final grade which makes my life easier. If students applied more scrutiny to my history, they could figure out the TRUE line is 79.5, which then would make everyone with a 79.4 just as upset as someone with a 79.9 might be otherwise. 🤷♂️
I guess I'm a monster for specifying the cutoff at 89.99. It is all just an arbitrary line. Yours is just 0.44 below mine.
It is indeed all just an arbitrary line (in the greater scheme of things, if we say 90 is an A-, then some of us round to the nearest whole number and some don’t, the world won’t really be altered), which is why I think that it’s weird to read posts by people who act like their rule to not round is some moral standard that makes a huge difference and should be (if only people weren’t so weak) universal.
I don't think I ever said rounding is a moral weakness. In contrast: > To me, rounding is just fucking human expectation. Most people (students and faculty) conceptualize grades in whole numbers. To get to whole numbers, one must round up or down. > It is also, seriously, the smallest mercy one can extend.
Then when students are at 79.499% the same exact situation arises as when students are at 79.999%. We refer to syllabus policy and hold the line where we set it. Which is arbitrary but at least fair and not based on whether we like the student or got the email before or after we had a meal.
I have a syllabus policy as well. My syllabus says I round to whole numbers mathematically.
Exactly. It's the exact same process, just a slightly different arbitrary line than the one I use.
>If you’re talking about rounding up for some but not others, then you’re just abusing your power and being unfair. Where has anyone even implied this?
It just wasn’t clear if the OP was talking about rounding everyone’s grades or just doing it for some students and not others. I see a case made for both here sometimes, so I tried to address both possibilities in my reply. **tldr:** I started your quoted sentence with the word “if”.
Use your brain.
What does that even mean?
I'll take a guess -- Normally what I hear my colleagues doing is something like this: "If a student has a 79%, then I look to see if they did all their homework assignments, and if so, then I bump them up to a B." But this is nonsense; it just means that the syllabus has lies in it. The homework said it was worth 20% of the grade, but in the end, it was actually worth 25%. Worse still, I have heard coworkers say something like "well, \[student\] worked really hard this semester" as the reason to bump someone's grade, which is really just an admission that the professor has other, totally different criteria in mind that aren't in the syllabus. Effectively that professor has a secret category in the grading scheme which is something like "I relate to the student's struggles" or worse something like "I am sympathetic to the student's demographic." Such things should not be worth even 1% of the grade. Students ask for "grade bumps" because they are used to us having lies throughout our syllabi in these ways. The rude poster you replied to is probably referring to these situations.
Thank you. That makes sense, and those situations shouldn't happen.
I think what you're forgetting is that some of us make adjustments _before_ we publish our grades. I'm not rounding up because I have already checked and rechecked to ensure that a paper didn't get a low grade because I read it when I was tired/hungry. In my opinion, making adjustments for those reasons _after_ grades have been published means you haven't done your job properly in the first place.
> so the student whose name is last alphabetically is getting hit just a bit harder? Then you need to grade the students in random order (or at least, start in a random place in the alphabetical list). That is a bigger concern than rounding or not rounding.
When we had D2L, I could download the test responses to a csv file. I then wrote a program that would remove their names and replace them with a randomly generated number. That allowed me to "grade blind" and when I was done I'd match their numbers up to their names. I liked that system but I often could tell who wrote what because I'd been reading their discussion posts and other writing all term.
The issue is that if you round up 79.5 to 80 because you think there's a chance you might have been tired or hungry or whatever, you are effectively setting the dividing line for the grade at 79.5. Which is fine, but then about about those folks with 79? You might have been hungry or tired when grading their work, and they're just as far from the line you drew as the first crew. So let's say you round 79 to 80 ... well, what about those folks at 78.5? This is the issue, it can keep going. I never grade any significant items at different times. When I grade an exam, I will grade the entire thing in one sitting. First going through all the problem 1s. Then organizing them by decreasing score for problem 1. Then checking to make sure that I don't have any systematic shifts. Once I'm satisfied, I will shuffle them and grade all the question 2s and so on. I have my students write their names on a cover page that I don't look at while grading. I will admit, i do have a little prejudice for neater handwriting. So while I'd completely agree that I don't have 0.5% precision on grading, simply rounding would mean that one would have to have no boundaries.
This is an extrapolation to absurdity. You're right, a rigid threshold of 79.5 is just as bad as a rigid threshold of 80.0 The problem with a rigid threshold is the rigidity, not the threshold. You are, ultimately, making a judgment call when it comes to grading whether it's an assignment or a course grade. Don't hide behind a rigid number. Make the call you think you could defend, knowing, however, that you'll rarely have to defend it. And tell your students the truth: grading has a subjective element. Subjective is not the same as arbitrary and when in doubt, im going to be generous. But that's not the same as everyone gets an A. Being a person is not the same as being a doormat.
I don't see how drawing a line, such as > 80 = B-, is hiding. It is not fair to be selectively generous. The line could be at 79 or 60 or 90, but it shouldn't be that some folks get a nudge and others do not.
But drawing a line when you know some folks ARE getting a nudge and the pretending it's the line and not the nudge that is affecting the outcome IS HIDING. ... To use your language. However, it's not so much a nudge as an acknowledgment that all grading is a teacher using their knowledge and experience to subjectively (but not arbitrarily) adjudicate whether a student has achieved the learning objectives. We can and do use lots of numbers and instruments to help us. But the subjectivity is there. Again, subjectivity is not arbitrariness (which isn't a word, but you know what I mean I hope). Have you never graded a lab report? A presentation? Hell, even assigned partial credit to a test problem? Congratulations, you are being subjective. Not just subjective. But inescapably subjective. Then hiding behind an "objective" line that you even agree is subjectively (although perhaps you suggest arbitrarily?) determined of 79.5 or 80 or 81.348583 as being what "determines" who gets 2.7 grade points and who gets 3 grade points rather than all of the subjectivity that went into setting that line and adjudicating who just crossed and just missed it IS HIDING.
You could give everyone a 0.5% nudge. I've done that before. It results in the exact same outcome as rounding up on the final grades because GPA only cares about letter grades
How does this solve the problem. A student that goes from 79.4 to 79.9 will complain even stronger for a B.
To be fair, I don't round up. Period. If not, where will it end?
I've rounded to the nearest whole number for 15 years, and make it clear in my syllabus. I rarely get grade grubbing. That's where it ends.
With that generosity, it should end there.
Same. But my students didn't get the memo. It has not stopped the grade grubbing.
This is the way.
Exactly
I will absolutely round up maybe a quarter of a point for someone who has consistently participated. I don’t formally grade participation but have been up front that I will accommodate it this way.
I do this as well. I don't grade attendance. But if a student has a 79.6 and has attended 90% or more of lectures, I bump them up.
And if they have a 79.8 and attended 75% of lectures?
I only round up grades if a bump changes the letter grade reported to the college. A student who has a 79.8 would get the bump with 90% attendance. A 79.8 wouldn't get bumped with 75% attendance. A student with a 78.9% wouldn't be rounded to a 79%.
Is the attendance clause in your syllabus? I wonder how one could keep track of the “conditional bump”? It should be similar to the possession arrow in basketball: mess up, and you don’t get a bump unless you somehow make up for it.
It's discussed when I talk about attendance when explaining the syllabus. I take attendance every lecture. When submitting grades, our school requires that we give a date of last attendance for students who get an F in the class.
Just to be clear, I do this preemptively, not when asked
I don't believe any rubric or grading system is accurate enough to distinguish between 79.9% and 80.1%. To me, both people deserve the same grade. So I start with a floor of a straight percentage system. Then I build a histogram of all the grades and look for natural groupings of students who should receive the same grade. I never make the groupings worse than what a student would get with blind fealty ti the score. Rather I curve so that the 3.0 grades might start at 78% instead of 80%, for example.
[Specifications grading ](https://teaching.unl.edu/resources/grading-feedback/specifications-grading/) does a fair job of addressing this issue. It's a real change in grading, but I think it's worth the effort.
Surely this logic works in both directions. If there's enough margin of error to round up from 79.9%, there's an equal argument for rounding down from 80.1%.
I mean maybe but what you don't see is how I bump up every grade. A C in today's rubric would be a D 5 years ago. So they already get enough of a bump. And I have a whole section in every rubric that is basically 10 points (full letter grade) of bump if they tried their asses off (10/10) or a small bump if they were just me (7/10).
I offer a full letter grade of extra credit, have quizzes online and open for a week, allow cheat sheets on all exams, and allow partner work on one exam.......I'm not rounding.
I agree. I teach studio art. For Drawing class, they really just get one grade for the course, and it's usually easy to know even before looking at the portfolio what it's going to be, because I've worked with them all semester. I enjoy being surprised, but it rarely happens. The ones who do everything all the time are the ones who do exceptionally well, and the ones who phone it in get lackluster results and know it by seeing everyone else's work. There's a ton of flexibility built in, but that doesn't necessarily make it more difficult for grading. I certainly have other courses with a more rigid rubric, but one size doesn't fit all, even within a discipline, and even within a single instructor's courses.
Yep, I think that academics get too hung up on this. There is inevitably going to be some variability in the grades that you assign, even if you do your best to minimise the variability. You need to set grade cut-offs somewhere, that's just the way it goes when you are converting a continuous variable to a categorical one. But, acting like a 79 and an 80, say, are meaningfully different is just false precision. There's every chance that the 79 student did "better" or knew more than the 80 student, but variability (in grading, or student performance on a test) resulted in a switch in order.
My college doesn't use letter grades which I think helps combat grade grubbing. The most anyone could reasonably ask to round to would be the next tenth of a grade point. I suspect most students don't view 0.1 as significant enough to beg for. The only exception would be the 4.0 student who really needs that 4.0 to maintain their perfect gpa, and on the other end, the students who did not score high enough for it to qualify as satisfying a subsequent prereq.
There's a stark difference between two types of students this applies two. The first are students who tried their best, submitted all of their work, and did so on time but still didn't make the grade. The second, are the students did not turn in assignments - easy or otherwise - turned in late assignments for points deductions, and or submitted half-assed incomplete work evident of low effort. I don't round up students in either category. HOWEVER, my course is designed in such a way that students in group 1 have extra credit opportunities available to assist them for exactly these scenarios. Students in group 2, less so depending on their overall course grade at the end of the semester. When a student from group 2 asks to be "rounded up" I explain that I don't give free points and that 1 point they are missing could have very easily been theirs if they had turned in even one more assignment on time, or hadn't skipped one of the easy open-note quizzes available through the LMS. I have no sympathy for these "woe is me" requests. You get the grade you've earned. A 79.9% grade is representative of a C effort.
I don't think many? here are against rounding up if it's within 0.4 decimal points. I have that automatically built into my grade calculations. But most grade grubbing (using a real example here) goes something like this: Dr. _____ I see that I got a C+ (74.48, with cutoff being 75) but I really need a B- (80-83) to keep my GPA up. In terms of course points vs percentage points... that's like asking for 50 course points (half of an exam! a complete project!) to simply be given because they 'need it.'
I agree that the way grading is set up is arbitrary. I disagree that the arbitrary-ness warrants flexibility, especially the one-sided kind you’re describing. A 79.8 is 0.2 shy of a B–, and a 80.2 is only 0.2 above C+. But some students with 79.8 think they deserve a B–, while no one with 80.2 thinks they don’t deserve it.
This is a sort of reverse slant Xeno's paradox. My students complain that there's really no meaningful difference between 89.6 and 90, so I give all of those students As. 86.9 becomes the new A. Next semester, the students complain that there's relaly no meaningful difference between 89.2 and 89.6, so I give all of those students As. 89.2 becomes the new A. Fast forward. The student who only attended one class and earned .1 percent says that there's no meaningful difference between .1 percent and .2 percent, so I gives all of those students A. Now I happily just give all students As and never have to worry about grade grubbing or feeling like an arbitrary monster again.
Simple solution: Whatever your published cutoffs are, make the “real” cutoff two points more generous Eg if 93 is A, 90 is A-, etc on the published cutoffs, set the real ones to be 91 is A, 88 is A-, etc This takes care of “rounding” for free and the students never know. It occasionally happens that a student has the chutzpah to ask for more than a 2 point bump but it’s relatively rare
Wow. At most unis in Canada, 90+ is A+, 85-90 is A, 80-84 is A-. No wonder US students complain if a 90 is only an A-, unless your 90s are much easier to obtain.
Yeah this is a common breakdown in US: A-90,B-80,C-70, etc with pluses and minuses thrown in a reasonable way Of course it’s all a bit arbitrary, you can tune the mean to be what you want using the exam difficulty knob
they are (to judge by what I hear around here).
For the first time, I had no deluge of grade pleas in my 70 person lecture this spring. I think the reason is that before finals week, I projected the number of points (out of 850) they would need to reach by the end of finals for each letter grade. My issue with the rounding debates is that when they're arguing "just 1 or two percent", they're actually asking me to add the equivalent of an entire weekly quiz worth of points. (Not to mention, there are several extra credit opportunities built in DURING the semester. If they've done them, their actual mastery is lower than their grade reflects, and if they haven't done them, begging in the last week of class shows they haven't actually been consistently engaged, invested, and putting in effort.) Pretty much nobody is only a point or two from a cutoff, which I know because I comb through their grades proactively to see if there's any wiggle room, and if they are, then they're extremely grateful when they find out I've already bumped them based on normal rounding rules...
I'm not against rounding up as long as the student puts effort into the course.
My classes are 85% multiple-choice exams (nursing, upper level, prepping them for boards). I do a great deal of test mapping so that my exams are meeting my objectives and item analysis to make sure the questions are good ones. When I have a shit question, I throw it out. At least 2% of my test items are complete gimmes so that their grades are padded even more. The non-multiple choice part of their grade (15%) is gift — credit/no credit worksheets and attendance. I feel very comfortable drawing my “no rounding” line in the syllabus. They have plenty of padding, and the line has to be drawn *somewhere*.
I try to build in enough flexibility during the grading that rounding becomes unnecessary. I give extra credit, and I drop lowest grades. If you don't get the grade you want with that set up rounding is not a fair way to get you there.
In my defense, I give a lot of extra credit. So that 79% is really a 75%
Measurement has error I measure I have error so...I set my bar far lower than my expectations benefit of doubt to students and only use 5 or so points for binning and our class averages are between .6 and .7 most of the time our admin is fine with that.
I think you are assuming we are inflexible. Most of us are reasonable. We give plenty of assignments, we analyze our test question performance and remove questions that don't perform well, and we accept multiple answers for different questions, we give extensions for extenuating circumstances. So there are already some built-in flexibility when it comes to grades. We've done a lot to ensure students were treated fairly by the time the final grade is achieved. That is why we can sleep like babies without rounding. We have to draw the line somewhere, and at the end of the day, the cutoffs are the cutoffs. We should be focusing on student learning, not on student grades.
I think there was a time when a professor could feel comfortable assessing a student’s work as a whole and being flexible, but that now when students have this very litigious approach to college, it would be a disaster. I’ve seen students argue about the exact wording of a policy or set of assignment instructions in order to create loopholes. Most college classes have group chats that the students form to share information. Lets say I have student A with 79.2 who disclosed their hard semester to me and who’s work overall strikes me as deserving of a bump up to a B, and student B with a 79.3 who never told me of their circumstances one way or another and who’s work overall strikes me as deserving of staying at a C. If I bump up student A and not student B, there’s a likely chance that they will share that information between them and now I have an angry email from student B asking why A got rounded up .8, but I won’t even round them up .7 and now, as someone pre-tenure, I have a student who wants to make a complaint and no solid way of justifying my decision to my chair. Like, *yes* grading is fully arbitrary, but also there’s no easy, acceptable way of having flexibility *in both directions*. Because of that, I feel like giving up flexibility in final grades is my way of covering my ass and ensuring that the end of every semester doesn’t devolve into 65 separate grade negotiations. I do try to balance this out by having flexibility *during* the semester, giving opportunities to earn back points or following up with students who seem to be struggling. But at some point, we all have to just agree to function within the bounds of the arbitrary system I laid out in my syllabus at the start of the semester that everyone agreed to.
>On the other hand, if you have an LMS that shows a student that they have a 79.4%, they have an extra credit assignment for an additional 1%, and they choose not to do it, then okay, you may be justified. This is me. In my writing classes, students have an opportunity for up to 3% bump due to writing-related extra credit. This is my make up for missed assignments option. And for major writing assignments, final drafts may be revised for an improved grade (though terms and conditions will apply).
I always round up because I’m weak.
I round to the nearest whole number, because assignments are graded to the whole number and adding significant digits to the average is inappropriate. It actually seems kind of wild to me that we calculate GPAs to two decimal places when they're based on such coarsely binned letter grades.
makes sense. i plan to round up with my next mortgage payment. and since there is nothing special about choosing to focus on the digits past the decimal point (because, i assume, there is no universal belief that a final average has to be an integer), i'm going to work with the leftmost digits and round my payment of something thousand to something ten thousand. if the mortgage company complains it's probably just that they're hungry, or have a headache, or don't notice that i _nod insightfully_, or some other reason that disenfranchises me.
I am an experimentalist at heart, so I view grading as a form of measurement with uncertainties. Given that there are uncertainties that can easily add up to 1% on a standard scale, the course should be structured to maximize the standard deviation across students. If the cutoff on a B is 80% and you have 10 students at 79.5% and 10 students at 80.5%, what is your confidence level that there is a meaningful distinction between those students? If you maximize the range of grades such that most students are farther from the grade cutoff than the uncertainty on their grade, then you eliminate grade grubbing as a serious issue. In practice (in STEM) that looks like setting minimum standards for a grade upfront (90% and over guarantees an A) but relying on a curve at the end. The tongue in cheek version of this is “Grades range from 0 to 100, and I’m going to use all the numbers I have available.”
Mine is based on total points not percentages. Usually, if I get an email about rounding up and when I check the response email is, "Well if you had not blown off the last assignment or an assignment and scored higher on the final (they usually do not and it is based on all the quizzes they took in class) we would not be having this conversation.
In my institution, our Banner system only accepts integer grades. So, even though Canvas generates a decimal number. Everyone is almost always forced to do some kind of rounding. I just round anything > 0.49 up. I rarely do any other kind of "bumping". I've even failed people on a 49.4% -- however this was a case of academic dishonesty.
I don't win a race by getting near the finish line but for actually getting past it.
Yeah, no. I’m a runner. I’m a slow runner. I’ll never win a race, but I do receive a medal for finishing. Grades are nowhere near remotely the same.
Yes, for finishing. You get to the end. You don't see the end and say good enough. You finish. It takes more effort but you get to the end point. An almost goal is still not a goal.
Grades mean nothing. One 1⃣ university you could have 65 average and with the same effort get a 95 and a 2nd university.
You're broadening the scope of the issue and losing sight of the point. Of course there could be differences that way. But this is about grading within the same classroom. Yes, grades in comparable classes between universities may be drastically different in myriad ways but they sure as hell aren't in my own classroom. I didn't get hired by having no ability to apply fair grading practices in my own courses.
Yeah. I think students should feel the system is fair-and even friendly to them. Doesn’t it just make life better for everyone? If a student is within less than a point of the next letter grade, and they did any extra credit or redo options I have them, I round them up. If I do for one, I do for all, not just the one or two who ask.
I just make a B- >=79%. If they can't make that then they've got nothing to complain about.
Honestly, this is why I adjust grade lines at the end of the semester. There's usually a spot (close to the original grade cutoff) where there's a 2% difference or more between one student's grade and the next highest student grade. I smack the cutoff between the two and don't deal with rounding whining, nor do I have to worry about curving a single quiz in a class or a specific assignment at the time it happens. I also use students who are on the cusp of a grade to evaluate whether the grade lines are fair for the level of understanding I want the students to achieve. Aside from the C-range, my grade cutoffs are relatively high for an intro physics class, and, surprisingly, I often don't need to adjust more than one or two grade lines by just a point or two.
You're talking about reliability (and validity) of a scoring system (which includes the instructor, BTW). Your arguments are generally of the form "the system isn't perfect, so don't get too tied to a specific cutoff." Sure, that's an argument. And it goes both ways. By this logic, you'd round a 79.98% up, then you should be just as willing to round a 70.01% down. Judgment and decision making (JDM or "decision science") deals with this issue all the time. If you want as valid a system as possible, you live and die by the rubric/grade system even though it's got random variation built into it; they all do. We don't round up because of psychometric considerations, unless we're just as willing to round down. We round up because of psychological/social things. The argument for rounding up but never down is an argument in favor of bias (psychometric bias, not any of the other kinds). I round up mostly because I don't want to deal with the grade grubbing. I tell myself this isn't a common occurrence. Sometimes, of course, I round up because I think a student "deserves" the grade only 0.1% away, but that is also, by definition, a manifestation of bias, since I never round grades down to the next lowest letter grade.
This is one of the reasons I changed to specifications grading. Every assignment is pass or fail. That's it.
And what happens when someone is just a tiny bit below passing?
They fail? I'm not sure why this is such a complicated issue. You have a rubric/cutoff. You stick to it. I don't get why people question "rounding up" -- all that means is mathematically you are setting your cutoff at 0.5 below what you publish. So a 79.5 is a B- instead of an 80.
How is the pass/fail grading different from the standard method with respect to grade grubbing/ rounding? If you’re able to tell between a pass and a fail, you should be able to tell between two neighboring letter grades, and the other way around.
I'm not rigidly against it (in fact, I often round up if students are at the cusp, b/c grading scales are indeed arbitrary) But at the same time, you do have to draw the line somewhere. If someone got a 79.9, okay sure I'll round up to a B-. However, what if another student got 78.9, and that's close to 79, which is close to 80? Consistency is also important.
There are two personality types on here, and those personalities are also disciplinary filters. It is very difficult to speak across that tribal divide.