Grades and scales are important tools for providing feedback to your students. Using these tools effectively can help you create a more powerful learning environment.
We recommend that you regularly download your gradebook for backup. Your system administrator should be backing up the entire server on a regular basis, but you can never be too certain. After all, your students will complain to you if they lose their grades, not to the system administrator.
To download your gradebook:
Click the Grades link in the Administration block.
Click one of the download buttons above the grades table.
Save the file somewhere on your computer.
Rename the file to include the date of the download.
If you follow the backup procedure on a regular basis, you will have a record of student grades if there is a catastrophic loss of data on the server. You can always recover students’ grades up to that point in the semester if you have a regular backup.
Teachers often want to be able to award extra credit. Fortunately, the gradebook’s advanced features make awarding extra credit easy.
To give an activity extra credit:
Click the Grades link in the Administration block. From the Grades page, click the Set Preferences tab.
Click the Set Categories tab. (If you’ve not yet enabled the advanced features, click the Set Preferences tab, then click the “Use Advanced Features” button to reveal additional tabs.)
Click the extra credit checkbox opposite the activity you want to award extra credit for.
Click the “Save changes” button.
Grading on a curve and translating numeric grades to letter grades are important tools for adjusting student grades to reflect the performance of students relative to each other rather than an objective standard. When the subject matter is very difficult, or if you are trying a new course design, this can be very useful for maintaining fairness.
The gradebook provides two tools for adjusting grades after you have awarded a raw score. On the Set Categories page you can set a maximum score for a scored activity below the original point amount. This is equivalent to grading on the curve. Usually, you will set the curve after the scores are completed. You may want to set the curve to equal the highest grade in the class. If you set the curve score below the highest score, students who score above that level will receive a score higher than 100 percent. Allowing scores above 100 percent may be a useful way of rewarding students who have done exceptionally well, and would have otherwise blown the curve.
You can also use the grade-letters scale to curve the total class score. There’s no law that an “A” grade has to be 90 percent and above. You can use whatever scale you want, as long as you are clear about it up front.
Jason: One of my favorite teachers in high school challenged us by making an “A” 93 percent and above. The modified scale encouraged the students to put that much more effort into their work to try to meet his higher standard.
If you have a course design where it is useful to give a lot of low-stakes practice (like weekly or daily homework), it can be difficult to balance the number of points possible in the practice with the number of points in higher-stakes assessments, like finals. For example, if you have 10 homework assignments, each worth 10 points, you will have 100 possible homework points. But if you want homework to equal only 10 percent of the final grade, your midterm and final would each have to be worth 450 points (for 900 points of assessment) to balance out the homework.
Categories and weights make it much easier to manage activity types and give them the correct weight when you calculate the total grade. If you want homework to be worth 10 percent of the total grade, create a “homework” category and give it a weight of 10 percent. Then create a “tests” category and give it a weight of 90 percent. You can then create two 100-point tests and assign them to the tests category. Put all of the homework assignments in the homework category. It won’t matter how many points the homework assignments are worth. All of them together will only count as 10 percent of the final grade.
The gradebook can be as useful in a business context as it is in traditional education. Most business training tends to be shorter and more focused than traditional education, but scores are still important. Usually, managers and trainers are only interested in exceptional/pass/fail or other simple scales for both activities and final scores. But trainees will still want to be able to track their progress and see how they are performing.
Gradebook scores can also be used to track progress against competency models. Try creating a category for each competency and track student scores on activities designed to measure the students’ performance against the performance standard.