How to Calculate Class Grade based on Percents?

Question

How do I calculate a student's grade based on the following criteria?

I have included some fake grades in each category.

4 tests are worth 60% of final grade
75, 83, 72, 86

1 quiz worth 10% of final grade
87

9 homework assignments worth 10% of final grade
7 assignments turned in/passed

4 concert papers worth 20% of final grade
3 concert papers turned in/passed

How would I calculate the homework and concert paper sections?

Finally, how would I calculate the final grade.

Thank you!

Answer 1

The KEY here is that you have to weight everything properly. For example, in one of my classes, the quizzes count for 35% of the final grade while homeworks only count for 20%.

Let's look at an example to illustrate how you'd calculate your final grade. To keep things simple, let's assume that assignments count for 55% of the grade and the final counts for the remaining 45%.

Individual assignment grades were 90, 83, and 85.
Final exam grade was 85.

1) Add-up the individual assignments, which would give you 260.
2) Multiply that 260 from step 1 by it's 55% weight, which would give you 143.
3) Multiply the final exam grade of 85 by it's 45% weight giving you 38
4) Now you'd add all those weighted grades (steps 2 and 3) together to see what the individual student's weighted total would be. Doing this gives us 143+38=181.

We would now compare this to what the maximum the student could have gotten would have been. Assuming that the best one could have done on individual assignments and the final was 100, we'd have:

a) 3 assignments with a maximum of 300 (unweighted). Multiplying this by it's 55% weighting gives us a max of 165.
b) Multiplying the maximum of 100 on the final by it's weighting gives us 45.
c) Adding these together gives us 165+45=210. This is what an individual student could have gotten (weighted) if they did everything perfectly!

Since our student got a weighted total of 181 out of a max of 210, that student's grade grade would be calculated by dividing the 181 by the 210 giving us an 86.