Overall grades
There will be 1300 points available over the semester. The grade boundaries are
| Letter Grade | Minimum Total Points |
| A+ | 1150 |
| A | 1100 |
| A- | 1050 |
| B+ | 1000 |
| B | 950 |
| B- | 900 |
| C+ | 850 |
| C | 800 |
| C- | 750 |
| D+ | 700 |
| D | 650 |
| D- | 600 |
Your final score will be found by rounding up to the next whole number of points, so for example 1099.4 points rounds to 1100 and earns an A (cutoff 1100). 1099 points earns an A-, and likewise for the other categories.
Components
This class has in-lecture work, pre-lecture readings, recitations, labs, etc. That means the points come from a variety of categories, summarized below:
| Component activity | Total points (scaled if needed) |
Percent |
| Homework | 300 | 23% |
| Midterm exams (100 pts each) | 200 | 15% |
| Final exam | 200 | 15% |
| Lab Reports | 165 | 13% |
| Quizzes | 100 | 8% |
| Readings and Pre-Lab Questions | 100 | 8% |
| Lab/Recitation Participation | 75 | 6% |
| Lecture Participation (TopHat) | 160 | 12% |
| Total | 1300 | 100% |
We may make small modifications to adjust to unforeseen circumstances that cancel classes or HW - snow, tornadoes, etc. The total number of points in the semester will remain 1300.
Homework
See the homework page for more information on homework.
If you have a homework assignment that shows you didn't learn the material as well as you'd like, take it as a chance to go back and master those subjects. To encourage you to do that, you can earn points back on that homework assignment by submitting a homework revision.
To do a homework revision after getting your homework back, identify what the key physical principles or other important concepts were behind the assignment and figure out what you learned about them by going over the homework. Then explain what these key concepts are, what you didn't yet know about them when working the homework, what challenges you faced when trying to sort them out aftewards, what you learned about them since, and how they apply to the homework. Also, figure out your own complete, correct solutions to the homework problems, or describe how the homework problem could have been modified so that the solution you originally wrote would have been correct.
You can submit a homework revision for any part of the homework in one week - so you might just do one problem, or you might do the entire thing over. You can submit for just WebAssign, just the paper homework, or both. However, please keep it to just one week when you submit. Of course, it might help to do this just for yourself for every homework if you have time.
In writing, the total length of this homework revision will usually be several pages. Submit this to me via email, or make a 15-minute appointment (via YouCanBookMe) to explain your work on these points in person, and I'll add back up to the full points for the homework, depending on the quality and accuracy of your work.
Because homework revisions require considerable time and effort to produce and evaluate, you may do at most one for each third of the class - one for a homework before the first midterm (submitted within a week after the midterm), one for a homework before the second midterm (again submitted within a week), and one for a homework after the second midterm (submitted before the final).
Roughly speaking, students doing A-level work overall are usually around 85% on homework. B-level around 75%, C-level around 60%.
Exams and Quizzes
Roughly speaking, students doing A-level work overall are usually around 75% on these, B-level 60%, C-level 45%.
See the Exams and Quizzes page for more information.
Lab Reports
Your TA will provide you feedback on your lab reports and well as grade them. The best way to get a good lab report score is the read the feedback carefully, ask follow up questions on how you can write better reports, and discuss with your group members how you can use the lab reports get better at collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data and relating them to physical models.
Do not worry if your lab report scores are low. Because TAs give feedback individually, some sections will have lower scores than others, generally. At the end of the semester, your lab grade will be adjusted to approximately equalize these variations. Your lab score may come up at the end of the semester, but I won't bring it down.
Readings and Pre-Lab Questions
After many pre-class readings, there will be a short assignment to help you process the reading before class. You can think of this as a small component of the homework in that you do it outside of lecture time, but it will be graded separately. Grading is for completion, not accuracy, so you should be able to earn all of these points. These are on ELMS.
Participation
Your TA will assign you up to 3 participation points for each recitation or lab that you engage in fully. If you miss recitation or lab for an excused absence, find another TA, contact them, and ask to join their section for the week. They will then give you credit.
Your lecture participation points come through Tophat. There will be up to 4 points each class meeting. If there are more than 4 points allocated in Tophat for the day, you'll be capped at 4. If there are fewer than 4, I'll add in the missing ones; IE if there are only 3 points in Tophat, I'll add one point to everyone who attended. These points are for participation only. You earn them no matter what your answers are, as long as you answer.
If you happen to miss a point due to a technical glitch, don't worry. Assuming you answer most of the other points for the day, I'll add in the missing one automatically.
If you miss lecture for an excused absence, you can earn participation credit by viewing the Panopto recording on ELMS, participating in the activities by yourself or with a friend, and emailing me your work afterwards.
It should be possible to earn nearly full credit for participation.
Bounties
There are small and potentially (hopefully very few) large mistakes in the materials for this course - typos, unclear wordings, broken links, wrong formulas, etc. There are also plenty of places where we could make the material clearer, more interesting, or more useful.
If you catch an error or have a suggestion to improve the course materials, email it to me. I'll add a few points to your score in the corresponding category. (A minor typo in the wiki will earn you half a point to your reading score. A helpful suggestion on how to improve a recitation tutorial could be worth 2 points to participation, etc.)
For lecture participation, you can also earn bounties by answering questions or providing hypotheses or arguments during whole-class discussion, or if I notice you giving interesting ideas, building off of and interpreting your classmates' work, or generally making positive contributions to class during group work.
I will also add some points for bounties when I see helpful, constructive participation on the course discussion boards on ELMS. This could be asking questions about the readings, concepts from class, or homework, or answering those questions, or pointing out links to resources you found helpful, or leaving some thoughts on a recent assignment or lab to share with the class.
Re-scaling
We will try to assign exactly the right number of points in each category throughout the semester. However, we might sometimes have too few, for example only assigning 285 homework points instead of 300. If that happens, your homework score will be rescaled out of 300. If you earned x points out of 285, your final score will be x*300/285.
If we assign too many points, you can keep the extra points up to the maximum in that category.