Letter Grades sent

Hi Class of 2011,

I finally sent in the letter grades to ASA today. The grade distribution remains roughly what it was last year - around 10% earned an A, 49% secured A-, about 31.7% obtained a B and the rest a B-.

Was glad to see some familiar names do well and was a little disappointed another set of familiar names do less well than I'd expected. By familiar names I mean people I have come to interact with and know in the course of the course.

So, again, all the best for the journey ahead. Do keep in touch going fwd and should you actually put into practice what you picked up in MKTR, I would love to hear about it. Should you as an alum tomorrow want to talk as a guest speaker to the MKTR class etc, that would be just great too.


Ciao and cheerios,

Sudhir

Grading related mailbag

Two emails I received (made anonymous) and my responses therein. IMHO, bear wider dissemination:

On peer eval impact on project grading:

    Can you please let us know the weight given on peer evaluation out of the total weight of 40 marks on the group project.


    Regards
    R

My response:

    Its a maximum of 4 out of the 40 for the project.


    And it is given only if there is concurrence (2 or more people in the group have peer rated a deviation similarly). We only had a handful of cases where the criteria were met.


    Sudhir

On phase II marks allocation:

    Apoorva,


    First thing I said I am fine with the marks for phase III.


    I just rechecked the standings on the number of responses which was put up on the professor’s blog finally.

    We were placed X th out of 37 teams.

    So, we were higher than median even without considering the ISB responses and also that we were a smaller team of 6.

    Now, it was communicated earlier to us that we will be given credit only for non-ISB responses and also depending on the team size.

    So, I do not understand why we should be getting a score of 7 which is below average. Clearly we performed better than more than ½ the teams so we would expect to get well above average.

    And as the prof. has pointed himself in his blog post there is not a big variation in any component other than this we cannot afford to get less on this when we deserve credit.

    Regards,
    V

My response:

    Let me answer this one.

    1.       ISB responses were considered except where IP addresses were clearly duplicated. The large numbers of foreign and otherwise recently nonresident students in several teams would have been disadvantaged otherwise. However, ISB responses were discouraged for others and rightly so. In any case we had about 10% of the total responses from within campus – not a magnitude that would reverse the current rank order or anything.

    2.       Groups that made the minimum threshold – 10 valid responses per team member – got the baseline score of 7.  This is the vast majority of teams – 26 out of the 36 we had (Apoorva, correct me if I’m mistaken here).

    3.       The top 5 teams in the total responses sweepstakes got additional credit of 1.5. Their totals were far higher than average responses/team, the responses seemed genuine and regardless of whether or not one normalizes by team size, their output was high and thereby merited additional credit – so I deemed.

    4.       The bottom 5 teams got about 0.5 points less than the baseline 7, depending on the actuals.

    5.       Over all the average was 7.18 and you stand where you do.


    Now, while I make no claims that this particular grading scheme was perfect or anything, it is consistent and objective. IMHO, of course. Changing anything at this stage will kickoff changes for groups above yours as well as those par –the vast majority of groups there are – and will likely nullify any grade related gains one may hope to make thereby. Hence, I shall go with what is currently done.

Sorry abt the delay in letter grades release. Shall be done soon.


Sudhir

We're putting the grades out soon

Hi all,

We'll be putting up the component grades and the overall letter grades out shortly.

A few quick points: (1.) There has been substantial revision of midterm answers - both in the MCQs and in the text portion. In particular, there's an entire 8 mark Q in part B that is being 'removed' from the exam. So everybody gets those 8 marks regardless of level of attempt. However, where folks have already made some attempt and received partial credit, the corresponding increase in their midterm tally will be lesser. Hence, NOTE: the increase may be uneven across students.

(2.)  Regarding quizzes and attendance, the grades are concentrated along a narrow band - as expected. Folks who have missed a quiz or two will have their marks imputed on some pro rata basis. I did not intend to have the quiz/CP portion be some big source of variation to start with.

However, I must note with some concern that the attendance tallies are too high to be realistic. For sure, I saw people during the presentations who I don't ever recall seeing in class. No doubt, proxies have been all the rage. That is unfortunate. I did want the folks who did diligently attend class to get some credit - some 1% point odd more but now that is impossible to rectify at this stage.

(3) The project grading has also been along a rather narrow band for phases 1 and 2. Only the extreme outlier 5 teams in the whole have gotten extra credit (1.5% more) than the others in phase 2. Phase 3 grades have been normalized across sections - so that section averages are comparable. Not much normalization was needed, as it turned out.

(4). Managed to get through to getting the lucky draw done. Its someone who filled out for team Atri. She'll be getting sodexho coupons worth INR 5000/-.

Have asked the AAs to put up the class avg and std dev on blackboard.


Chalo, that's it for now.

Sudhir