Quiz, interim assessment, mid-sem: which of these can actually sink you

It is the first week of October and your timetable now has words in it that were not there in September: quiz, interim assessment, mid-sem. Someone in your group chat says the mid-sem is "basically half the course". Someone else says quizzes "don't count". Neither of them has checked, and you cannot tell which assessment you should be worried about.

The answer is in a document you were given in the first week, and in the university's regulations. Here is what they say, what a bad result on each one actually costs, and how to work out the numbers for your own courses in about ten minutes.

Where the marks actually are

Every course you take is marked out of 100, and the 100 is split into two parts. Continuous assessment is everything during the semester: quizzes, interim assessments, mid-semester exams, assignments, practicals, presentations. The end-of-semester exam is the one paper at the end.

The split is fixed by the university, and it is not the same at every university:

• University of Ghana. The undergraduate regulations (section 9.24c) say the end-of-semester exam "shall constitute 70% of the grade for the course while continuous assessment constitutes the remaining 30%". Practicals and courses marked entirely by continuous assessment are the exception.
• University of Cape Coast. The grading policy sets continuous assessment at 40 per cent and the exam at 60, with "a minimum of two (2) Continuous Assessments per course per semester".
• KNUST sets it programme by programme. The Pharm D programme, for example, uses 70 for the exam and 30 for continuous assessment, and other programmes use 60 and 40.

So the first fact to hold onto: on most courses, everything you sit before December adds up to between a third and two-fifths of the course. The quiz, the interim assessment and the mid-sem share that 30 or 40 marks. None of them is "half the course".

What a bad one costs, and what it does not

Here is a worked example. The breakdown is made up for illustration, so do not borrow it; your outline will give your own. Take a University of Ghana course where the 30 marks of continuous assessment are split three ways:

Assessment	Worth	A good day	A bad day
Quiz	5	4	1
Mid-sem	15	12	6
Assignment	10	8	8
Continuous assessment total	30	24	15

The pass mark at the University of Ghana is 50, grade D. (The regulations' grading table puts 45 to 49 at grade E, which is a fail.) So the question to ask is: how much do I now need out of the 70 in the exam?

• After the good quiz and mid-sem, you need 26 of 70: about 37 per cent of the exam.
• After the bad quiz and the bad mid-sem, you need 35 of 70: 50 per cent of the exam.

That is the whole cost. Two bad results in a row moved the exam target from a little over a third to a half. It is a real cost, and it is worth avoiding. But it is not a fail, and nothing has been decided. The exam still holds 70 of the 100 marks. At Cape Coast, where continuous assessment is worth more, the same bad half-semester costs a little more and still leaves the exam deciding the course.

What actually sinks you

The things that fail a course outright are mostly not marks. They are in the regulations, and few students read them:

• Not sitting the exam. At the University of Ghana, a student who is registered for a course but does not take its end-of-semester exam "shall be deemed to have absented themselves" and is given grade X, a fail (section 9.23d). Grade I (Incomplete) is for absence "for reasons adjudged by the Board of Examiners as satisfactory", which means reasons you have documented and someone has accepted.
• Missing classes. A student "absent for accumulative period of 25% from all lectures, tutorials, practicals and other activities prescribed for any course" is treated as having withdrawn and "shall not be permitted to sit the semester examination" (section 9.22c). In a thirteen-week semester, that is about three weeks.
• A course requirement left undone. Departments set requirements for their courses. A practical, a field trip or a lab book may be one. A student who does not meet them "shall not be allowed to take the examination for that course" (section 9.22b). Check whether your outline lists one.
• Not being on the course list. If your name is not on the course list, you cannot sit the exam (section 9.23d). Registration mistakes are found in October or they are found in the exam hall.

And if a course is failed, it can be retaken: under section 9.38 you re-register and repeat it on a later occasion, for a fee, and the grade you earn then is awarded in full. But the transcript "will show the number of occasions the candidate took the examination". A resit is a real way back, but it is slower and more expensive than passing the first time.

Why the small ones are still worth sitting properly

If a quiz is worth 5 marks, why take it seriously? Because the marks are the least useful thing about it. In Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel and McDermott's 2011 classroom study, a teacher gave her pupils three low-stakes quizzes on some of the course material and not on the rest. On the graded chapter exams the pupils scored 94 per cent on what had been quizzed and 81 per cent on what had not. On the end-of-semester exam, months later, they scored 79 per cent against 67. The quiz itself barely counted. Being asked the questions is what helped. That study was with school pupils rather than undergraduates, but the effect behind it has been repeated in hundreds of studies, including university ones. The practice questions guide goes through that research.

The same research team asked 1,408 school students about quizzes like these, in a 2014 study. Seventy-two per cent said the practice made them less nervous about the real exams. A quiz is a rehearsal for the exam, with the cost of a bad result kept small. Treat a bad quiz as information: it shows you which topics you could not answer from memory, at a time when getting it wrong costs you almost nothing. There is more on why that early "I thought I knew this" feeling misleads in The revision that feels best is the revision that works worst.

Do your own numbers tonight

Ten minutes per course:

1. Find the course outline for each course. Look for the assessment section. It should state the continuous-assessment / exam split and, ideally, what each piece of continuous assessment is worth. If it does not, ask the lecturer or the course rep this week, not in November.
2. Write the breakdown down, like the table above: each assessment, what it is worth, what you have scored so far.
3. Work out the exam target: 50 (or your university's pass mark), minus your continuous assessment total so far, as a share of the exam's weight. Do it again after each result. It is one subtraction.
4. Check the four things that can sink a course outright: your name is on the course list, your attendance, any course requirement, and the exam date.

Then go back to studying. The course outline is useful for more than the arithmetic, too: it lists what the exam can ask, line by line, and next week's post is about reading it the way the examiner does.

Sources

1. University of Ghana (2017). Regulations for Junior Members, Vol. 1, sections 9.22–9.24 and 9.38, and the grading table. ug.edu.gh
2. University of Cape Coast. Grading System. ucc.edu.gh
3. Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Pharm D: assessment. pharmacy.knust.edu.gh
4. Roediger, H. L., Agarwal, P. K., McDaniel, M. A., & McDermott, K. B. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in the classroom: Long-term improvements from quizzing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17(4), 382–395. doi.org/10.1037/a0026252
5. Agarwal, P. K., D'Antonio, L., Roediger, H. L., McDermott, K. B., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Classroom-based programs of retrieval practice reduce middle school and high school students' test anxiety. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(3), 131–139. doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.07.002