Understanding Grade Calculations

Determining grades from requirements and thresholds is an important concept, so let's explain it as accessibly as we can. Please forgive our silliness (and our indulgent use of ridiculous polka-dot themed clip art).

The Allegory of the Cookie

Imagine you're baking a batch of delicious cookies. The recipe for your cookies requires that you have some ingredients:

Making cookies also requires that you have some supplies:

The number of cookies you can make depends on how much of each ingredient you have, and depends on the quality of your supplies.

Perhaps you have enough flour to make 3 dozen cookies and you have enough baking trays to hold 5 dozen. With these ingredients and supplies, you can make 3 dozen cookies.

Or, perhaps you have enough flour to make 4 dozen cookies, but two of your five baking trays is rusty. With these ingredients and supplies, you can still only make three dozen cookies.

Calculating your grade distinction from your set of ratings is a lot like calculating how many cookies you can bake.

Like cookies, mastery-to-grade-distinction calculations have recipes. Let's check out the recipe for an A+ in our example course:

Consider the lines of the recipe that start with: "Earn at least". These lines are a lot like the ingredients in a cookie recipe. The more ratings you have at the stated mastery level (like say "Satisfactory"), the higher a grade distinction you can make (i.e., the more cookies you can make).

Now, let's consider the lines of the recipe that start with: "Earn at most". In the cookie recipe analogy, these lines are like requirements for the quality of your supplies. The more ratings you have at the stated mastery level ("Unassessable," for example), the lower the grade distinction you can achieve (i.e., the more baking trays that are rusty). Instructors add these requirements to their grade distinction recipes because they want to ensure a student's foundation of work is strong enough to support their mastery.

Now to revisit the grade calculations table detailing this (real) student's grade.

This student's portfolio of ratings met the threshold for an A+ in both of the "Earn at most" requirements (the requirements that ensure the baking trays aren't rusty). This student has plenty of clean, non-rusty trays.

However, this student's work evidenced mastery in the B- range on one of the "Earn at least" requirements (the ingredients that make the dough). This student's portfolio only has enough ingredients to make a B-. This is similar to running out of sugar or flour when making cookies. The number of cookies you can make is limited by the amount of sugar you have on hand.

The moral of this delicious story is that grade calculation requirements and thresholds are a lot like cookie recipes. In baking, the question is: given my resources, how many cookies can I make? In mastery-to-grade-distinction calculations, the question is: given a student's portfolio, what's the highest grade a student can make?

Looking Forward

In the next section, we'll talk about how to create and fine-tune course threshold values. For grade calculations to be in a sweet spot (see what we did there?!), you'll need to make sure your thresholds are well-balanced.