I have a question for my fellow educators. Do you let the students know what their grade is before the final exam? I never did this before but I decided to do it this semester. I need to be able to enter my final grades into the system very fast because I’m leaving for Europe almost immediately after the finals. So I calculated what the grades are like minus the final exam. And I let the students know where they stood.
The results have been confusing. On the one hand, many of the struggling students were terrified of their projected grade and REALLY prepared for the final. Some of them handed in the kind of high-quality work that I was so unprepared to see from them that I kept checking their names on the first page. (This is a language course, so cheating is impossible.)
However, several of my star students did atrociously. I don’t know how one can manage to forget the entire Spanish language within a week just because one has seen one’s final grade but that is precisely what happened. To give an example, a Francophone student did not get a single case of the Subjunctive and the Preterite / Imperfect right. Not a single one! And these are the tenses that exist in the same form in French and in Spanish, which was a constant subject of jokes between me and her. (“Ah, Jacinthe, I guess you are finding this material to be super easy!” “Yes, professor, it’s exactly the same in French!”). I can’t believe she messed this up so completely.
So I’m wondering whether I should continue the practice of telling the students their grade before the final exam. Do you have any suggestions? What do you do?
Clarissa's Blog 
How much was the star student’s final letter grade brought down by poor performance on the final?
I know when our professor’s would let us know our grade before finals, I would calculate how well I’d need to do on the final to keep an A, and the distribute my study time among subjects accordingly. I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing – maybe your star student kept a good grade in your class anyway, but used their study time to do better on an exam in a subject they are struggling with.
Also, it seems strange that they would miss every single question for something like that, especially if they demonstrated understanding before – that seems less like they didn’t study, and more like they whizzed through it or were very tired or something on the day of the final.
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The thing is, this is a language course, you know? You either speak it or you don’t. I mean, you don’t make any grammar mistakes in your comments no matter how rushed you are. I don’t know how people can just lose their knowledge of a language all of a sudden.
Now I don’t know what to do with the star student. Normally, we are not supposed to give As to people who failed the final, but I know she speaks great.
Or used to.
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It just seems like if she was understanding and answering the material right in class, it seems odd that she would “forget” it. Especially with the previous knowledge of French. I mean, I’m terrible at languages, but even I could manage to get several of those right on an exam typically, and I didn’t have the benefit of other romance languages to help me out.
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When I see that a student has completely messed up an exercise in an exam and I know that that student knows the material, I talk to him/her and if his/her explanations are convincing I allow him/her to re-do the exercise for half the points. The students has to completely mess up the exercise though for me to apply this policy. In my 11 year experience as a language teacher this happened 3 times.
I never give my students their grades at any point in the semestre. Instead, and even though I find it childish, I put a grid in the syllabus where they can put their grades and calculate them whenever they want.
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I publish the grades online for all assignmets as soon as they appear, and from the course outline / syllabus the students know how much each assignment is worth towards their final score. So if they can do some simple arithmetics (and if they can’t… well they should not be in the physics course), by the time of the final they know where they stand, and how much effort they have to put into the final to improve their grade. The end result is the same as with you telling them the “grade-minus-the-final” grade, but it is less of a shock to the students, as the process is gradual.
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Mine could also calculate their own grades. In theory. But these are not physics students, so they have the excuse of not knowing how to use a calculator. 🙂
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I put all the grades on the course management software, so they can see how they are doing throughout the semester. It calculates averages and overall grade for them. Personally, I think think it is important to give them this information, and keeps me from having complainers in the end. Generally, the good students check it and the bad students don’t.
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I mostly give students their “grade so far” only by request. The grading policy varies from course to course, so in some courses I get more requests than others. In a very large class (over 90, say) I may write homework totals on tests that are to be returned.
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