How to calculate your grade

I get a lot of requests, particularly at the end of the semester, for grade calculations. I don't typically do custom grade calculations; all of the information is on the syllabus and it's much more efficient for me to set up a spreadsheet and do it all at once at the end, instead of doing it individually 200 times as students come in. But here's some guidance for how you can do this yourself:

1. All of the information about how the course grade is calculated is on the syllabus for the course.

2. I do not use the gradebook in Canvas to calculate and any totals, averages, or overall points given there will not reflect the overall structure of the grade in my classes; not all of our work is in Canvas, and Canvas doesn't weight those numbers, or take out low scores, or make other calculations.

3. My Critical Thinking course has this grade structure:

Here's how to calculate a running grade for Critical Thinking:

A. Get the scores for your best of the pairs of 11 quizzes in Canvas. If they aren't all done yet, estimate reasonable guesses for the ones that haven't been done.

B. Since they are 5% each of the overall grade, take those scores (out of 10) and multiply each one of them by .5. Since they are out of 10 points, not 100, we multiply by .5, not .05 to get their correct proportion of the overall grade.

C. Get your scores for midterms, homework assignments, papers, or finals. If they are worth 10% each, then multiply that score (out of 100) by .1. For the Midterm and Final scores for Critical Thinking, the score in Canvas is out of 20. Multiply that by 5 to convert to a 100 point scale. Then, since it's worth 7.5%, then multiply that number by .075.

D. Estimate your Journal grade. I've given full grading criteria at the top of the assignment pages for the journals. If you've met all the requirements for writing the journal entries all semester, then you can assume full credit. So that would be a full 10 in the spreadsheet calculation.

E. Add all of the numbers you produced in B, C, and D. This should give you your score out of 100% possible for the course.

F. If the semester isn't done yet, you can insert different possible values for the remaining assignments to figure out how you'd need to perform in order to get an A, B, C, D, or F overall.

Take this hypothetical student: who made 8s or 80s on everything.

The quizzes are out of 10 not 100, so we multiple each by its percentage of the overall course grade times 10. 5% = .5

Multiply the homework grades by their percentage of the overall course grade: 10% or .1

Put the midterm and final into a 100 point scale by multiplying by 5 (they are out of 20 possible points.)

And enter the estimated journal grade out of 10.

Add all of those values together for the total out of 100: 80

There's a spreadsheet here with more details that shows the calculations.

Letter grades converted to numbers: