Frivolous Regrade Policy

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Background

There has been a lot of abuse of the exam regrades. In the past, some students would submit a regrade request for every question on the exam. As there used to be no penalty for these regrades, presumably they figured that it could only help their grade. The VAST majority of these regrades that were submitted earned no points back. We have, in the past, tried a regrade policy based on lowering exam scores for requests that earned zero points. However, those policies caused other issues.

We want students to be able to submit regrades for questions on the exam(s) that were graded incorrectly. However, we feel it is the student’s responsibility to justify to course staff that the request is not frivolous. You can find the policy on regrades below.

This policy only applies to exam regrades at this time. Your constructive feedback on this is welcomed – you can submit a support requests, lab submission or anonymous feedback (note that the problem with anonyous feedback is that there is no way to respond to your concern).

Submitting a Regrade Request

If a regrade request is submitted, it is the student’s responsibility to do the following:

1. List out each question for which a regrade is being requested.
2. Clearly justify the request by citing the grading guidelines for each question.
3. Display working knowledge of the question when arguing this position.

For example, a model regrade request might look something like this: “Question 4) The guidelines say that 1 point is awarded for code that initializes an array of twice old capacity. My code clearly has a line that says newArray = new int[capacity*2];. Thus, I believe I deserve 1 point instead of zero on this question”.

In the example above, the student lists the question, cites the grading guidelines to justify the points, and shows knowledge of why the exam answer fits those guidelines and deserves credit.

Policy

If a regrade request is submitted, we will read the request and do the following:

• If the request DOES NOT follow the model outlined in the previous section, we will ignore the request regardless of the underlying merits of the regrade.
• If the request does match the model above, we will look at the question again and set the score to its CORRECT VALUE. Note that this could result in a lower score if a lower score better matches the grading guidelines for the question.
• We reserve the right to look over the rest of the exam and adjust the score of any question to its correct value given the grading guidelines. This means that we may find more points to award on the exam or may find points to deduct on the exam.