Administration Guide

13. The Marking System

For internal students, the final mark is calculated from three items of information; for the extramural students from two. Everyone has two essays and one final exam to write. The additional bit is that internal tutorials count towards the mark for internal students.

For internal students, attendance at a single tutorial counts 1%. This accumulates to a maximum of 10% of the final overall grade (for attending 10 or more tutorials).

Simple arithmetic will show that this is a very good deal for internals. The range between the lowest "C" and the highest "C+" is only 9 marks (50-59); that between the lowest "B-" and the highest "B+" is only 14 marks (60-74); that between the lowest "A-" and the highest "A++" is only 25 marks (75-100). So the difference between going to tutorials and not is very close to the difference between getting a mark in the "B" range and getting a mark in the "C" range on both essays! (Tutorial sign-up sheets will be distributed the first week of internal classes.)

For internal students, each essay counts 19.5% towards your final overall grade. For extramural students, each essay counts 24.5%.

The first essay we usually mark a little lighter than the second one (it’s a hard business first time out). And if your essays show improvement through the semester, we tend to count the first as slightly less important than the second.

The final examination counts 51% towards the final overall grade.

Internal students are thus marked:

10.0 (tutorials)
19.5 (assignment 1)
19.5 (assignment 2)
51.0 (final exam)

for a total of 100.

Extramural students have no tutorials, of course, so their assignments count more.

24.5 (assignment 1)
24.5 (assignment 2)
51.0 (final exam)

for a total of 100 again.

We aren’t stupid or slavish about any of this. In particular, we always try to err on the side of charity. For instance, if your semester’s work is way out of sight worse than your final exam, we tinker a bit to give the exam more weight - we assume that things have finally come together in the exam, which often happens towards the end. If your exam is just awful, but your semester’s work is quite reasonable, then we tinker a bit the other way - we assume that you panic in exam situations and so on, again something which it is very easy to do in philosophy. Most teachers engage in a bit of this no matter what they say. It’s called common-sense.

The credit you receive for 134.101 is 12.5 points. Use this as a rule of thumb for the amount of work you are expected to put into the course (in preparation, essays, lectures, tutorials): expect to kiss off 12.5 hours of your life per week. (The rule of thumb is roughly the same for all courses in the University.) This is much more than some students seem to calculate - on average at least 2 hours per night spread over 12 weeks! Don’t enrol in more courses than you have a reasonable chance of spending the time to finish: single semester teaching leaves few cushions.

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