Warren Smith, master teacher ;) =============================== THE GOOD NEWS ON THE FINAL: --------------------------- According to the computer-grading of the final, only 20% (that is, 5) of the 25 students in my math55 class who took the final, scored below 50th percentile (dept. wide). (And: the one who scored the lowest basically hadn't been showing up for class.) If my students are a random subset of the dept's students, and I were the same as the other teachers, then the probability that this few (or fewer) of my students would have scored below median, would have been -25 25 ( 25C5 + 25C4 + 25C3 + 25C2 + 25C1 + 25C0 ) 2 = 68406/2 = 0.0020. (Or if you want to use 49% as the chance of being below median, not 50%, then this would have still led to 0.002 to this many decimals of accuracy. And remember, somebody else wrote the final and I never saw it until the minute you took the test.) So with 99.8% probability, we're better than they are! So consequently, our class is going to get better grades than them! Way to go, team! Hooray! THE BAD NEWS: ------------- You could have done better still! Quite a few students left early but made stupid errors they could have fixed if they'd spent that extra time doing sanity checks and independent recalculations. Remember, if you have probability P of making an error on a question, if you do TWO INDEPENDENT calculations of the answer, the probability you are going to be wrong both times is P*P, which is a LOT smaller. (If P=0.3 then P*P=0.09.) And even if you are wrong both times, the chances you'll get the SAME wrong answer (so you don't notice) are a LOT smaller STILL.