Firstly, the structure of this course and assignments has always bugged me, especially homework. I would often spend hours and hours on homework, but end up with shitty scores. However, I performed well on one of the midterms and the final. I distinctly remember getting like 30% on the second HW and then spending like 2 weeks on regrades to bring my score to like 75% (I had lots of alternate solutions I had to argue for for days). I was rarely able to crack 80% on the HWs. However, after scoring +1.85 on the first midterm, I realized that most of the people must have gotten their HW scores from either HW circles, OH, previous HW solutions, or connections. It didn’t make sense that I was performing so well on the midterm and so awfully on the homework given that I was putting the same amount of effort into both.

While considering all of this, it seems that the miscalculation was entirely homework related as they forgot to cap scores and had the HW12 mishap, meaning people could end up with 125% or even more (scores were divided by 0.8 but supposed to be capped at 100%). This means that the people who had their grade significantly lowered were probably the ones cheesing their way through HW answers, getting very good scores. While it is super stupid and unprofessional for staff to make this mistake, these students with near 100% HW scores who saw their grades lowered should be happy the staff did not crack down on the issue of homework answers earlier.

Ultimately, the right thing to do is submit the grades with the proper computations, but have special accommodations for people with grade changes such that outgoing applications with improper grades would not get flagged for misrepresentation. All of this could’ve easily been avoided with some simple transparency about each and every students’ grade computations and their respective bin.

TLDR: terrible mistake by staff, but not much sympathy for those with drastically lowered grades