Welcome to the website of ME 274 for the Fall 2008 semester. On this site you can view blog posts, add your own blog posts and add comments to existing posts. In addition to the blog are links to course material: course information, information on solution videos, exams, quizzes, homeworks and other course-related material. Direct links to the homework solution videos are also available on the left side of this page.


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Sep 29, 2008

Exam No. 1 - statistics

Click here for the statistics for Exam No. 1. Let me know if you have any questions on this. If you have any questions on the grading, do not hesitate to contact me.




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3 comments:

gbaker said...

Do you know what the average was for the exam?

September 29, 2008 at 9:19 PM
Andy said...

if i'm reading the statistics right, it looks like an incredibly rough estimate would put it right around 46 or so (give or take)?

September 29, 2008 at 9:44 PM
CMK said...

All,

There are a several reasons why I hesitate to give out the overall averages for the midterm exams.

* One is that I want you to focus on how you performed on the individual questions. If you did well on a problem relative to the rest of the class, good job! If you did not, you should figure out where you went wrong. Work through it again and see how you could have prepared better for that topic on the exam. Midterm exam questions quite often reappear on the final exam. Effort that you put in now in reviewing these problems will pay off in your preparation later on for the final exam.

* Another is that an average score is more meaningful when there is a "bell shaped" distribution. Take a look at the grade distribution for Problem No. 1 -- this distribution is anything but bell shaped. Over half the class had perfect or near perfect scores on this problem; over 60% received a B grade or better. The rest of the scores were not so good, reflecting that some people were not well prepared to work this problem. The average score on this problem (14.8/20) does not tell us much since virtually no one got that score.

* Finally, comparing your exam scores against the class average is not a good predictor of how you will do at the end of the course. Our grading scale in this course (25/50 weighting on low/high of the midterms and finals) is somewhat nonlinear. You might end up doing "average", or a little below average, on the midterms. If you are content with this, you might not prepare well for the final. On the whole, people do better on the final than on the midterms. Those who do better get the 50% weighting on the final and, as a result, your "average" scores are no longer average, possibly dropping you a letter grade if you do not improve with the rest of the class on the final exam score.


Having said all of this, I do not want to deny you this information if you feel that it is important. The average (mean) for Exam No. 1 was 40.7/60, or 67.8%.

Let me know if you want to talk about this.

CMK

September 30, 2008 at 11:49 PM

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