History of Colonial Latin America

I know that some of you would like to know if you should take advantage of my offer to skip the final test/paper! Here’s how to figure it out:

Get out the syllabus and look at the grid marked “major assignments” The final paper on Erauso is worth 13% of the total semester grade. So to calculate what you would have if you removed that from your grade, figure that all your grades will add up to 87% instead of 100%.

Put the grades you received in each of the boxes next to the percentage weight for that assignment. You should have numbers for everything but the Erauso and presentation projects. For class participation, average the two numbers that I’ve already reported (I will assign one more CP grade but it will average in with the other two).

Now multiply across for each assignment. If you got “87″ on the Mann paper, multiply 87 by 12% and you get 10.44. Do this for all of the grades and total the result. You might want to “guesstimate” your grade for the presentation and make this part of the calculation.

If you did the Erauso paper, we would divide this sum by 100% which, of course, gives you the same number. Since you want to see what your grade would look like without the Erauso paper, divide the sum by 87% [say, for example, 77 divided by .87; that would give you 88.5 which is a high "B"]

You’ll notice that with 77 on the 100% scale, you’re only 13 points away from a 90, which would be an “A”. What would you have to score on the Erauso paper to get those 13 points? bring your total up to a 90? Well 13 points divided by 13% [the weight of the Erauso assignment] equals 100 points. So you would need to do very well on the Erauso paper to get an A.

Keep in mind, however, that your grade on the Erauso paper might well be the highest you get all semester.

1. You have more time than on nearly any other paper. It isn’t due until May 5.
2. You have more feedback from me about your strengths and weaknesses and my expectations than at any other time in the semester. A lot of you have really improved your work and with focus this improvement could continue.
3. The Erauso book is brief and very interesting! And it fits into many of the themes of the course that we’ve been talking and writing about since January.

So i would encourage you to do the paper! But the choice is yours.