<p>How do keep track of your grades during the semester? Do professors provide print-outs for you or something? How often are they updated, if at all?</p>
<p>u can see it thru at uportal.cornell.edu I think cuz there's a secttion there for results of exams.</p>
<p><---Lol...I'm on 1,999 posts.</p>
<p>Yeah, I noticed that, but I don't know how often it's updated.</p>
<p>You can keep track of your semester grades and your cumulative GPA via Just the Facts.</p>
<p>As for your exam and course grades during the course of a semester, some classes use Blackboard and will let you keep track of your course grades on there. The problem with college classes is that the curves are determined at the end of the semester. This means that the raw percentages you are stuck with through the course of the semester mean little. However, you can always estimate your grade on each exam based on the means and std. dev.</p>
<p>For some classes you will be using blackboard which lists all your HW/exam grades. For others you have to keep track of it yourself.</p>
<p>Oh, I didn't realize the curve is for your overall grade...I just assumed they curved each test.</p>
<p>For each test, they will give you an "estimated" curve based on the mean and std dev for that test. If the professor is especially nice, he will give you estimated for percentages for each grade (ie he will tell u that 85-100 is around an "A" and so forth). However, just about all the professors will tell you that such curves are only estimations. They will wait till the very end of the semester before deciding the final curve.</p>
<p>This only applies to curved classes of course (which make up most of my courses since I'm a science major). For the uncurved classes, you can do weighted averages to figure out the grade yourself or your grades may be on Blackboard if the class uses it. In most college classes, you won't have as many grades as in high school. I've had classes where we only received 2-3 grades (usually prelim grades) the entire semester so it's not a big deal keeping track yourself.</p>
<p>i have not seen anything that lets you keep track of your grades during the semester, which aren't many. and you really don't know what your grade will be until the very end. it's always a surprise. sometimes painful, but a surprise. don't forget that a large part of your semester grade comes from the final, which you don't take until the END. so depending on how you did on the final, you could be between a C and an A. So just try to stay above the mean and you'll be getting A's and B's.</p>
<p>Professors don't even think about final grades until the course is over anyhow because it's the big picture they look at when deciding how the grading scheme is going to work, and that's hard to do without all the data. All you can do is do your best, and if you are ahead of the mean on tests, then it's working.</p>
<p>What sux is that for every single course I took in highschool my Midterms and Finals exams were the worst grade (when you average them and the average together)...ugh</p>
<p>Midterms and finals will still be your worst grades in college. The difference is that they make up a greater percentage of your overall grade (sometimes 100%) in college.</p>
<p>Hurrah!!! lol</p>
<p>at cornell, most classes have 2 prelims and a final. the prelims cover what you have done in the particular 1/3rd of the course, and the final is mostly the final 1/3. other grades are calculated in, such as attendance, participation (dep on class size), labs (dep on course, aka not biology), homeworks, and online quizes. the majority of your grades will be composed of prelim grades, and the prof generally gives you an estimate of where you are at. for example, in bio, the mean is a set to a B- and one standard dev above is usually an A-. This changes a small amount at the end of the year as quizzes, attendance, and clicker questions (in class questions) are calculated together. dont worry, i did poorly on one prelim and studied hard for the final and still did very well in the class.</p>