Hello hello!
As you can guess from the title, (even though its a bit late, or early, in the game to be calculating your grades) today I’ll be sharing with you all a process that I go through before every exam period. A question I get asked a lot when I drill my friends for questions/blog topics is ‘how can I pass’ or ‘how can I get (insert grade here)’, while the straightforward answer (that no body seems to want to hear) is to “go study”, I thought I’d put a spin on it and actually provide you guys with something that may help you get there!
P.S. Apologies for the chipmunk voice. I sped the video up a bit as I know your time is precious 😉.
All three numbers, your goal, current grades and how much the exam is worth are changeable, however the method of calculating how much you need in the exam will stay the same. This means whether you’re calculating how much you need to pass, or how much you need for an A+ this method is still applicable!
Things to note:
- If you get a number over 100%, it probably means its impossible to reach your intended goal (unless there are special circumstances or scaling)
- You can go one step further and calculate the actual score you need in an exam if you know how many points there are in the exam (e.g. 180 points in total for the exam). You do this by multiplying the % you found by the total points (e.g. 73.33% for a 180 point exam is 0.73333 x 180 = 132 points).
- There may also be a minimum % you need to score in an exam to pass, e.g. for some of my courses you need 45% to pass the course, even if you can pass overall with less than that in the exam.
- This is just a method I use! There may be discrepancies with your calculations using this method and your actual grade, largely depending on your course and your lecturer (especially if there is scaling). What shows up on Canvas and/or communicated by your lecturer/course coordinator will always trump what was demonstrated in this video. Please do not take this as academic advice!
This was quite a simple piece of math (one that many of you braniacs will scoff at!), but if this video has been of some help to someone out there, I’ll be glad!
Until next time,
Cecilia