There has been a lot of abuse of the exam regrades. In the past, some students would submit a regrade request for every question on the exam. As there used to be no penalty for these regrades, presumably they figured that it could only help their grade. The VAST majority of these regrades that were submitted earned no points back. This is our definition for a frivolous regrade -- a request for a regrade that does not earn any points back. Submitting frivolous regrades is not only annoying, it consumes a huge amount of course staff time. Thus, the policy described on this page was instituted to lower the number of frivolous regrades.
The other side is that we do not want to prevent students from submitting regrades where they believe that they deserve points back. And if one really does deserve points back on a number of questions, but not on one or two, then there should be some leeway to account for this. The policy described below tries to achieve this balance.
This policy only applies to exam regrades at this time. Your constructive feedback on this is welcomed -- you can submit a support requests, lab submission or anonymous feedback (note that the problem with anonyous feedback is that there is no way to respond to your concern).
A frivolous regrade is a regrade request on a single question that does not yield a return of any points for that question.
When a regrade request is submitted, it is for some number of questions, of which some (possibly none; possibly all) will receive points back.
The goal is for the number of good regrades to exceed the number of frivolous regrades. Any difference where there are more frivolous regrades than good regrades will result in a penalty of 1 point (NOT percentage point!) per extra frivolous regrades. However, all students will have a grace of one frivolous regrade. So the total penalty will be f-g-1 (if that number is zero or negative, then there is no penalty).
For example, if you requested points back on 6 questions, 2 of which yielded points back and 4 of which didn't, then q=6, g=2, and f=4; the penalty would be one point (f-g-1 = 4-2-1 = 1).
However, the 1 "grace point" will not count if the regrade is particularly obnoxious. This is really meant for the case when the regrade asks for more points but does not specify the question -- meaning that they are just whining for more points without a (stated) valid reason.