Dear Principal,

Thank you for your letter concerning the grade of student M. I appreciate your

confidence in me as a teacher, and I assure you that I will demonstrate sufficient evidence of

my findings. Since you were a math major in college, this will be simple. I have chosen to leave

the student M’s grade as is for the following reasons.

To begin, student M is present in class almost every period and has only had one

unexcused absence all semester. Student M turns in homework the majority of the time,

although got a bit of a rocky start the beginning of the semester by not turning in two

assignments. The average percentage of homework grades between exam 1 and exam two was

an 82.1%. Since this is a passing grade, this leads me to believe that student M was conceptually

sound on all of the material that we had covered. On test 1, the class average was a 75.3% with

a standard deviation of 15.6%. The lowest exam grade, Q0, was a 54.3% and the highest, Q4,

was a 104.3%. Student M scored a 65.7% on this exam, which is less than one standard

deviation below the mean. The z-score of the student is -.61. Although student M is below the

average, this data is reasonable. The exam scores appear to be skewed right. On the second

exam, the class average rose. The new average for this test was 76.9%, with a standard

deviation of 13.7%. Student M scored the lowest in the class, with a 50%. This is almost two

standard deviations below the mean, as the z score is -1.96. Since the z-score was so low, I

looked further into the statistics of each question from exam 2 to determine what student M

struggled with. Although he or she complained about question 3, this was not the overarching

issue. On question 3, student M scored a 5/10, receiving half credit for the problem. Question

three was the second most difficult question, yet the lowest scoring question is dropped so that
the exam is only out of 70 points. Question 8 was determined to be the most difficult, and

student M earned 4/10 points on that particular problem. The student’s worst score was on

question 6, where he or she earned 0/10 points. Strangely enough, according to the rest of the

data, this was the easiest question on the entire exam. The class averaged 6.06 points on

question 3, and 8.31 points on question 6.

This data demonstrates to me that the grade of student M should not be changed. The

question on the exam that gave him or her the most issues was proven to be the easiest on

average for the other students, so it would not be fair to throw out that question. Although

problem number 3 was difficult, it was not the most difficult, and student M actually did better

on that question than multiple others. Thank you very much for understanding, and I hope that

this data sufficiently clears up the issue.

Sincerely,

Angela Krak