Exam Attendance

  • Exam attendance at the specified time is required.
  • There are a few exceptions to this rule, and if you are requesting one of these exceptions you must email the course instructor, copying the Undergraduate Vice-Chair. The exceptions, detailed below, are unanticipated and serious medical emergencies, death in your immediate family, and qualified disabilities. There are no other exceptions. (There will be no exception for students attending job interviews or beginning jobs or internships before the end of the term, or for any other non-educational reasons that entail an absence from the University on scheduled exam days). Since the exceptions are narrow and well defined, your email request for an exception should be short and to the point.
    • Unanticipated and serious medical emergencies are when you are in the hospital or clinic during the time of the course exam. Verifiable documentation from the health care facility must follow your email. Any such documentation should clearly state that the student was admitted to a hospital or clinic for in-patient services for a serious health condition and was therefore unable to take the exam.
    • Death of an immediate family member may require an absence from the campus to attend services. Immediate family members are your parents, siblings, spouse, and children. A student who misses an exam due to the death of an immediate family member should submit evidence within two weeks. Acceptable evidence includes (i) the death certificate of the deceased and the documentation that confirms the relationship between the deceased and the student; or (ii) the obituary that includes the relationship between the deceased and the student. The service must have taken place on one of the three days, (i) the day of the exam, (ii) the day prior to the exam, (iii) the day following the exam. If a student cannot produce such evidence within two weeks, the missed exam grade will be zero.
    • Students with a qualified disability who require academic adjustments (relating to exams or others) Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, (29 USC Section 794) (ADA) must register with the Center for Accessible Education (CAE) – formerly called the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) – before receiving any academic accommodation(s).  The CAE will communicate all proposed academic accommodations, including any modification to examination attendance requirements, directly to the instructor and the department.  When possible, students should register with the CAE within the first week of classes so that a timely request for accommodation can be made.  Whenever possible, the CAE will proctor examinations for eligible students seeking this type of academic accommodation. For additional information and the qualification conditions, please visit the CAE website at http://www.cae.ucla.edu/.
  • On-time exam attendance: Students who arrive late will have less time to finish the exam. The exam time will never be extended unless subject to one of the exceptions set forth in paragraph A(2), above.

Make-up Exams

  • Under no circumstances will a make-up exam be administered if a student misses a midterm.
  • If a student misses a midterm exam due to an unanticipated and serious medical emergency or due to a death in the immediate family, then the missed midterm exam score will be imputed by using only the final exam score. The Department-wide method of imputation is simple. If the midterm exam was missed due to unanticipated and serious medical emergency or due to a death in the immediate family, and the final exam score turns out to be, for example, 80 out of 100, then the missed midterm grade will be recorded as 80 out of 100. This simple method of imputation, which does not adjust for potentially different difficulty across exams, will be used unless an instructor specifically states a different rule.
  • If a student misses the final exam due to an unanticipated and serious medical emergency or due to a death in the immediate family, then that student will be required to take a makeup final exam administered by the Department at the officially announced day and time. It is the student’s responsibility to contact the instructor and the undergraduate counseling office to make arrangements for the makeup final exam. Unless subject to one of the exceptions set forth in paragraph A(2), above, exams will not be rescheduled for a different time or place.
  • If a student misses all exams, this student will receive an automatic grade of F.

Deadlines

  • Late work, whether problem sets, exams, papers, or other work, does not count for course credit. It receives a grade of zero. There will be no exceptions granted.  Work submitted in accordance with any modified deadlines determined by CAE to be a reasonable academic adjustment will not be deemed “late” if submitted within the modified deadlines.
  • E-mail submission of such work is not allowed and will result in grade of zero unless specifically allowed by the instructor.

Weighting

  • The relative weights on the different elements of the course work are set by the instructor. The Department has no set weights.
    • At the discretion of the instructor, grading may be done using multiple weighting schemes. For example, two weighting schemes may be used: one in which the midterm receives 0% weight, and one in which the midterm receives positive weight. Overall course scores will be computed for each student using each of the weighting schemes, and the maximum of these overall course scores for each student will be used in determining final grades.
    • Instructors have the option to normalize scores for each weighted element of the course. For example, raw scores for a particular exam may be normalized by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation.
  • The rules that permit (or do not permit) dropping the lowest problem set score are set by the instructor. One Department-wide rule is that, if the course permits dropping the lowest problem set score, a student who has entered a course late and missed the first problem set drops that one, not a later one.

Correcting Errors in Grading

  • Students who have been graded incorrectly should petition for a correction in writing to the Professor, copying the Undergraduate Vice-Chair, within the first two weeks of the following quarter.
  • The entire graded work (problem set or examination) shall be re-examined. There is no guarantee that only upward adjustments will occur. While careful and accurate grading is expected, positive and negative errors in grading are equally likely.

Impacted Course