Top Law Schools

What effect does a midterm worth 10% of your over all grade really have in a curved class? Just wrote one, but haven't received a grade. It's impossible to gauge how I did compared to others (obvi), but need to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

It's called simple mathematics. It can answer your question directly.

FullRamboLSGrad wrote:It's called simple mathematics. It can answer your question directly.

Tru. Guess I'm being insufferably neurotic.

So you have 10 of 100, if you get 5/10 the highest grade available in the class is 95 if you got 90/90 on the final. And that all depends on your curve.

But the difference between a B on 10% of your grade is 2 points of your overall grade. A B in 90% of your grade is a loss of 18 points. So the overall effect isn't that bad.

That's how I always looked at it. Take 100 and work backwards.

That makes total sense. I'm going to stop stressing now.

I'd like to see statistics, but I'm fairly sure that midterms worth this little hardly ever actually dictate the final grade.

In other words, what you get on the final will be what you get in the class, regardless of what you get on the midterm. The midterm is just worth too little and there is not enough granularity in the final grades to need the midterm as a tie breaker.

I'd love to see statistics, but yeah, it's all about the final.

The grade itself is not worth a lot, but I bet there's a positive correlation between doing well on midterm and doing well on the final ==> i.e., keep doing whatever you were doing