As a school year draws to a close, grades are inevitably on the minds of both students and teachers.
When computing final grades, teachers sometimes allow students to drop the lowest score—or even several of their lowest scores—from a sequence of quizzes, tests, homework assignments, or exams. Usually, it’s the teacher who makes the decision on which scores to drop in any individual case. If the goal is to maximize a student’s score, that’s sometimes easy to do. But, in certain situations, it can be quite tricky to tell which score or scores to drop from the total.