November 2, hours 22-23: Rings
October-28-10
11:51 AM
From an email message I sent to a student, after (s)he inquired about his/her low mark:
Indeed your mark is low. It counts for just 25% of the total so in theory, you can still end this course with a pretty high grade. It is not for me to tell if this theory can become practice - I only know that your mark on this test was low, and I cannot speculate what the reason was. Bad luck? Insufficient preparation? Insufficient background? Bad day? Something else? Only you can know (and perhaps even you can't) if this was a one-time issue and you can expect things to get better, or if it is a good predictor for your final grade.
You definitely have to consider it as a serious warning sign, and you do have to figure out what went wrong and how it can be fixed.