600 points is base-10, best I can recall from high school. It is 6 X 100, or 60 X 10. 
 
I usually have 200 points available in a course so I can have more room for finer-tuned evaluation. A 40 point quiz is worth 80 points so I can award finer-tuned partial credit for each question.
 
Having said that, Michael is right: it would be marginally easier for students to envision 100 points or 1000 points than to have to divide 200 by 2.  Ah well. 
 
Ginny

________________________________

From: Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk on behalf of Michael O'Hara
Sent: Fri 2/20/2009 5:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: 600 points



ALSBTALK:

        Math skills vary widely across the USA population.  And, in spite of a university's or a college's general education or core course requirements that invariably include some amount of math education, that wide variation of math skills routinely existing among our students.  Further, the lower range of math skills always is startling for any attentive instructor following the distribution of grades.   

        To an person trained in economics who has taught the core undergraduate courses in economics and thus knows what the business students were taught, it always is a surprise that business students have not and can not doe the very simple algebra of computing what (numerically) a student needs to achieve, given what has been achieved, if that student is to earn the course grade desired by that student.  Hence, my subject line of 600 points. 

        Why do professors draft contracts with non-base 10 grading systems?  Why 600 points rather than 1,000 points? 

        Why is it good to use 250 + 100 + 100 + 50 + 100 = 600 total points rather than use 417 + 167 + 167 + 83 + 167 = 1,000?   

        Of course, after viewed from the perspective of 1,000 the beauty of the individual assignment's weighting is such that the professor is likely to alter the relative weighting in the pursuit of beauty; since, of course, if beauty equals truth, truth is an excellent pedagogy. 
 
Michael

Professor Michael J. O'Hara, J.D., Ph.D.
Finance, Banking, & Law Department
College of Business Administration
Roskens Hall 502 
University of Nebraska at Omaha 
Omaha  NE  68182 
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(402) 554 - 2823 voice  fax (402) 554 - 2680
http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm <http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm>