(disclaimer: these are my personal opinions and the rest of the course staff may disagree with them)
Let me then ask you a more difficult question: why give a factor at all?
Possible answer: to compensate for an exam much more difficult than planned.
Personally, considering the mixture of questions we picked, I think our exam wasn't difficult. Q1 was a BFS/DFS question with a story. Q3 was a slight variation on a question from HW, which I happened to repeat in the review recitation. Q4 was a multiple solutions flow question we sometimes give as HW. Q5 was a variation on a KMP question asked in at least 5 previous exams. Q2 was indeed a challenging question, but based on a question from HW.
So that's not it.
Another answer: to compensate for extraneous conditions.
Let's ponder then a ‘socialist’ factor: everybody gets +5 points. What then? the guy complaining about 80->86 won't be any happier. In fact, almost everybody gets less.
If you think about +10, you're unrealistic. It oughtn't be possible to get a 100 in the course by solving just the four easier exam questions. It's unfair for the students who got a very high grade.
Undesirable as some of you may consider it, the square root factor (the effect of which we attenuated by blending with the original grade) tries to increase grades with minimal impact on the relative difference between grades that were originally close.
Indeed, many differentiable monotone functions $f:[0,100]\to [0,100]$ could do, and I don't see a specific problem with the square root.
Putting it in simpler words, I value differently the 10 points difference between 40 and 50, between 65 and 75 and between 90 and 100.
P.S.
Ask your friends from the Technion for piquant stories about a factoring scheme that manages to boost the average grade without helping any student.
guest (guest) 25 Jul 2012 16:55
