Always Do the Extra Credit
Posted on March 15, 2010 | Categories: School | Tags: college, exams
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In high school, I never really bothered doing any of the extra credit my teachers sometimes offered. My grades were always excellent and most of the time, I just couldn’t really be bothered to do it. However, in college, that has changed dramatically.
If my professors offer an extra credit option, I do it. If my professors allow students to edit/revise work and hand in an updated version of the original assignment for an improved grade, I do it. If my professors provide an option that involves anything with boosting a grade, I do it. (This might sound like there are a lot of extra credit options in my classes, but there actually are very few extra credit opportunities. When they do happen, they come in all different shapes and sizes!)
It’s not that my grades are worse in college than they were in high school. On the contrary, my college GPA is higher than my high school GPA. It’s just the fact that there aren’t as many overall points that make up a course grade in college, particularly as classes are run on a semester-based system rather than a year-long one. If, over the course of 15 weeks, a class only has three 60-point tests that comprise your overall grade (so, 180 points total for a college class compared to the hundreds of points for a high school class), extra credit does wonders if one of those three tests has a poor result.
Take what happened in one of my classes today, for example. We received our midterm exams back, and the overall class results were all over the grading scale. There were several 100′s but there were also a handful of failing grades (the lowest score was 25%!). However, my professor had offered an extra-credit option of writing a short essay over break, which I completed. Thank goodness that I did, as the extra credit points saved my current overall class grade from getting walloped by the midterm exam!1
For the tl;dr crowd: always do the extra credit. It never hurts and it just might save your grade!
- I did not do poorly on the exam, but my exam grade was lower than my current grade in the class, so the extra credit saved my class grade from dropping any further. [↩]
Crissy
Wouldn’t three 60 points assignments be 180 total points? Or did I just misread that?
I’m in highschool, and no one gives me extra credit. I am jealous of students that get the opportunity.
Manda
…this is why I am not a math major. LOL. I’ve fixed it, thanks!
Kaylee
The only teacher I have who is giving an extra credit opportunity is the one who makes it really easy to get 100% in the first place… I’m still gonna do the extra credit, though! :P
Lucy
Yes, I definitely learned this after my first semester of university. It stinks when your whole grade is comprised of the mid-term and final because if you bomb one of them, there goes your grade for the class. So I always do any extra credit work regardless of what my grade is. Even if it was good, you just never know when you might have an off day taking the next test.
Krissy ♥
I never do extra credit stuff. XD Like you, there’s rarely the opportunity to do it in the first place, but any time I was ever given the chance to, the amount of work you had to put into it wasn’t worth how much it counted for in the end. Upping my grade by .1% didn’t matter to me for all of the hours I would have to put into the assignment.
Manda
To me, it matters to improve your grade – even if it is only by 0.1% – if the grade is being weighted heavily in your overall average! On the exam I mention in my entry, for example, I was awarded three extra points (out of 100) to my grade, which counts for 15% of my overall grade. 3 points is enough to move you up a fraction of a letter grade (eg from a B to a B+, a B+ to an A-, etc), and in my experience, that can make all the difference in your final class grade.
Caity
I always did the extra credit, too. It never hurt even if I had an A. You’re so right though. You never know what is going to happen so it’s always good to be prepared just in case.
PS: I love your little “For the tl;dr crowd:” – it made me giggle.
Amanda
Hmmm, your high school system must work differently to ours. I’ve only just started at uni, so I haven’t had a chance to get any grades, let alone improve them. But i don’t think i would get any though :/
Clem
We don’t get much extra credit here – once in awhile we’ll have the option to hand something in early and get a bonus of 5%. I’ll do it occasionally; if I feel like my project would benefit more from having an extra week, I’ll opt out of the extra 5%, but otherwise I’ll do it.
I wish we had more extra credit options. :( I could use it in some cases!
Charlie
Only those in the highest classes in my school got the choice of extra work like that which always seemed wrong to me. As long as you’ve time to do it, extra work is worth it. I didn’t think that so much at the time, but any courses I do in future I’ll definitely be doing as much work as I can.
Zeenie
I’m usually too lazy to do the extra credit, but if it’s in a class where my grade is in jeopardy, I’ll do it.
My math teacher gives us 2 points on every test if we write the value of the number e. It’s a grade-saver! But most of my teachers don’t do that.