In nxskok/make.legal.grades: Adjust list of class grades to not award one less than a letter-grade boundary

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make.legal.grades

Turn unrounded course marks into rounded ones, not awarding grades one less than a letter-grade boundary.

Installation

You can install the released version of make.legal.grades from Github with:

devtools::install_github("nxskok/make.legal.grades")

Example

The University of Toronto makes us submit number (percent) grades for our students, which for GPA purposes are then converted into letter grades. Students don't like getting a number grade one below a letter-grade boundary. Giving one is a sure-fire way to receive emails from students asking to be rounded up (to which the answer is "no").

The default nogood (see below) has 79 as one of the grades not to award, since 80 is an A- here. This is what I do:

library(make.legal.grades)
makelegal(c(79.6, 79.4))

79.6 rounds up to 80, 79.4 rounds down to 79, so I round it down one further, sending the message "you didn't get to 80".

Other possibilities can be handled by supplying a fudge factor, which is added to the input before it is rounded:

makelegal(c(79.4, 79.1), fudge=0.5)

This rounds all 79s up to 80. Or you can specify one or more number grades not to award:

makelegal(c(81.6, 81.4, 79.4), nogood=81)

81.6 rounds up to 82; 81.4 rounds down to 81 and is rounded down again (because I don't want to award 81). There is now no problem with awarding a 79, which is what 79.4 rounds to.

An additional use of fudge is to allow students who are very close to get the higher grade:

makelegal(c(79.4, 79.49))
makelegal(c(79.4, 79.49), fudge=0.02)

The reason for writing this package is that I always had to find last semester's R code and copy the function. No more!

Other possibilities

One of my colleagues sets harder exams, and then rounds each student (except, presumably, for the ones who fail) up to the next letter-grade boundary. That would require another function, which I guess I now have to write.

Also, I would like to expose the list of forbidden grades, or perhaps the lowest number grade to achieve a certain letter grade, in the package also. I have to remember how to do that.

nxskok/make.legal.grades documentation built on April 22, 2021, 10:41 a.m.