For official purposes, your numerical score on Exam I remains your actual midterm grade. This numerical score will eventually be used in computing your overall grade in the course.
However, in order to give you a sense of how you did on the exam, we are also providing the following guide to help you interpret your exam score as a letter grade. These letter-grade translations do not have any official status, and you should therefore not obsess about them if, for example, you missed a certain cut-off by a point or two. Their main purpose is to provide a very rough measure of how you are doing in the course, as compared with the performance of all the other students.
| Score Range | Letter Grade |
| 90--100 | A |
| 80--89 | A- |
| 75--79 | B+ |
| 65--74 | B |
| 60--64 | B- |
| 55--59 | C+ |
| 45--54 | C |
| 40--44 | C- |
| 30--39 | D |
| 0--29 | F |
The cut-offs imposed here are intended to be
very generous. They give half the students a B- or better,
and three-quarters of the students a C or better.
On the other hand, if your exam score was less than 30,
your exam performance ranked you in the bottom 10% of those taking the exam.
This indicates that a mistake was almost certainly made when you were placed in this course.
You are therefore urged to immediately drop down to MAT 126, Calculus B.
You can drop down without penalty, but the form needed to do this
would need to be filed with the Registrar by Friday, Oct 7, at 4 pm. The form does not need to be signed by anyone from
MAT 132, but would require the signature of a Calculus B Professor, and would then need to
be approved by the Mathematics Undergraduate Director, Prof. Scott Sutherland (who is, incidentally,
also one of the Professors teaching Calculus B). Note that, due to a recent change in Math Department policy,
your exam grade would not follow you if you dropped down. Instead, you would
start with a clean slate, and your grade in Calculus B would instead be based on the remaining
exams in the course.
If your exam score was less than 45, your exam performance ranked you in
the bottom quarter of the class. Students in this situation might be well-advised to similarly consider
dopping down to MAT 126. Again, you can do this until the end of the week. In deciding whether or not to drop
down, it might also be helpful to know that most of the remaining
material in Calculus B
coincides with the topics you've just been tested on in Calculus II. Dropping down
would offer you a perfect opportunity to finally master this material.