How to Accurately Predict Your Grades

Blackboard grades aren’t accurate until the end of the semester.

The reason that I say this is that Blackboard cannot accurately predict weighted grades because it doesn’t know you, it doesn’t know your habits, and it doesn’t take into account all future grades. The weighted grades that the program calculates can only include the assignments, exams, and papers that have already happened.

So how are you supposed to know how hard you need to study for that next exam or how much turning in assignments on time will actually affect your grade?

If you take 15 minutes to make your own weighted grade sheet, you will be able to much more accurately predict your grades (as well as figure out how much effort you need to put into studying; more on that in a future post).

Note: if you’re interested, you can always attend an AUSNA meeting or stop by a free Monday afternoon tutoring session during the fall semester to get help setting up your own custom grade sheet as well.

---

How to Make Your Own Grade Sheet

I’ve attached an example from Term 4:

Example Grade Sheet.xlsx

Download XLSX • 17KB

There are only a few steps to setting up your own grade sheet, and all you need is your syllabus and an excel document.

In the first column, which I named Item, you should list out all of the things that contribute towards your grade that semester.

The next column should be the Score. This is where you need to know yourself pretty well. Guess how many points you think you’ll get on that exam/assignment/paper. If I were guessing what I was going to get on an exam that’s worth 40 points, I may put in 36 or 38 (because I know I’m probably not going to get 100%). If it’s an ATI assignment that’s worth 35 points, I’ll probably put 35 (because I plan on doing the assignment and receiving all those points). You can go back in once that item has been completed and add in your actual score later. You can also adjust this up and down throughout the semester to see what score you need to get on an assignment/exam/quiz/whatever in order to get the grade that you want.

The third column I named Out of; this is will be how many points are possible. You can get this directly from the syllabus.

The fourth column will be your Points Received. In my excel document, this is actually a formula I set up (Score/Out of*Weighted %). It is the second column (the amount of points you received) divided by the third column (the amount of points possible) multiplied by the fifth column (weighted %).

The fifth column is Weighted %. This is how much of your grade each exam, paper or assignment is worth. You’ll usually find this in parenthesis on the syllabus. When you add up this column, it should equal 100.

I like to add a sixth column called Item Grade just so I can double check my grade % with the one on blackboard. It also helps me when I’m guessing my grades ahead of time so I don’t have to do too much math and a percentage makes more sense to me. I might look at my grade sheet and think, ok, I only need to get an 80% on this next assignment to get an A in the class.

On the example here, I included two tabs. The first – Calculated Grades – is what I’ve described above. In term two especially, there are a LOT of daily work, pop quizzes, and other random assignments that are all calculated into your “daily work” points (which were worth around 5% of my grade). I included the Daily tab so that I didn’t have to keep track of the daily work myself; I could just enter whatever random item they had us do on that page and it would automatically insert the grade into the first tab for me.

---

There are tons of websites that will do this for you as well; I prefer to have an excel spreadsheet so I can customize my grades every semester. Once you learn how to do this, it becomes extremely easy to set up for yourself each semester. I’ve used this format a million times for myself as well as handed it out to classmates and students I’ve tutored; every semester, I've been able to estimate my grade accurately within 0.01%.