Course Gradebook Settings

Gradebook Security Settings

There are three levels of gradebook settings:

1. Entire School
2. Course Level for individual courses like Language Arts 7.
3. Section Level for individual sections like one teacher’s section of Language Arts 7.

Gradebook settings can be defined for the entire school, course, or section. Courses inherit school settings, sections inherit course settings. Section level settings stay with the section, as sections only exist for a single year (or less). School and Course level settings are copied from the prior year when prior year settings exist. Any setting can be set to NULL to inherit from higher level settings. The non-null setting values are displayed in bold. This means the value is explicitly set, rather than inheriting the default value from the next higher level. The explicit value may or may not be the same as the higher level value, but will not be affected by changing the higher level default value.

Inherit means that the course inherits from the school level policy and the section inherits from the couse level policy.  

Locking and Unlocking

If the gradebook security is locked, no one with a lower security level can modify the settings. If unlocked, they can. 
You can lock the gradebook settings for the entire school.
You can lock the gradebook settings for a specific course.

School Gradebook Settings

Starting at the School Office Menu, click the Course Gradebook Settings link: 

Then Click the School Gradebook Settings link on the left. These are the default gradebook settings for the entire school and only can be accessed by a user with Admin privileges.   

Combined Average Policy

When both types of gradebooks are enabled (letter grade and standards-based gradebooks), either one or both can be used for the same course to determine the overall average.

Standards Grading Policy

Full Year Mastery Calculations

Mastery Levels track a student's progress in learning a particular skill or standard. Since learning continues progressively from term to term (well, hopefully it does), it makes sense that the Mastery Level calculation will also span all the terms in a full school year. You can maintain one continuous Mastery Level calculation throughout the full school year or you can start the Mastery Level calculation fresh each term (marking period).

Overall Grade Calculation 

The Standards Based Gradebook is not based on points, like the traditional Letter Gradebook is. However, sometimes (especially in upper grade levels) you just need to have a single overall grade that shows how well a student has done in a course. The "Overall Grading Policy" allows school administrators or teachers to define a formula for converting all the Mastery Level scores for a student into a single numeric percentage. That percentage can then be mapped to a numeric score or letter grade for use in progress reports and report card. Whether it is numeric score or letter is determined by the desktop course marking system (Skill or Letter). This overall grade will be shown as the subject average directly below the course name in the standardized report card.  

A grading Policy consists of a Policy Name, and up to 5 criteria. Each criterion consists of a skill Type (or All Skills), a weight, and a formula to apply to that type. If a Policy includes more than 1 criterion, they are averaged together using a Weighted Average with the specified weights. There are 3 different formulas to choose from for each criterion.

Scaled Percentages

A scaled percentage value start with a raw percentage, and then modifies it by applying a "Scaling Floor" to produce the final average. The scaling formula is: Floor + [Raw * (100- Floor)] The floor value becomes the lowest percentage possible, and the percentage is adjusted to span the remaining space between the floor and 100.

Scaled percentages are useful, because the raw percentage values do not map well to traditional points-based grading systems. For example, in the default "Proficiency" Rubric, if you convert the 0-4 Mastery Level score range to a simple raw percentage, you get results like those shown below.

Using only the raw percentage, a 2 would be an F (50%), a 3 would only be a C (75%), and even a 3.5 "Exceeding Standard" score would only be a B (87.5%). If instead, we use a scaled percentage value, with a floor of 50 or 60, we get much more reasonable results, as shown below.

Example:

Floor + [Raw * (100- Floor)]

Using a score of 1 (the lowest standards based score in a 1 - 4 rubric)  mapping to a Raw Percentage of 25% (1/4 = .25)  expressed as a decimal of .25 and a floor of 50 the formula works as follows:

50 + [.25 * (100-50)] 

50 + [.25 * 50]

50 + [12.5]

62.5

You can experiment with scaling floor values to see which ones suit your needs. Usually, floor values between 50 and 60 work best.

Average to Scaled Percentage

This formula averages all the Mastery Levels for a student together, to produce a Scaled Percentage value.

Scaled Percentage Mastery

This formula calculates the Scaled Percentage of skills that the student has mastered. For example, if the class teaches 10 skills, and the student has mastered 7 of them, then the raw percentage for this formula would be 70%. The Mastery Level scores that count as "Mastered" are defined by the Rubric.

Scaled Percentage above Threshold

This formula is similar to "Scaled Percentage Mastery", but instead of using the defined mastery of the Rubric as the threshold, you can specify any threshold level you want. For example, with a Threshold of 2.5, if a student has 2.5 or better in 8 of 10 skills taught, the raw percentage would be 80%.

Course Gradebook Settings

Starting at the School Office Menu, click the Course Gradebook Settings link. These are the default gradebook settings for each course. 

This is the second highest security level where administrators can set course grading policies. 

The idea here is similar to the school level settings for all courses but applies to a single course such as Language Arts 7 and its sub-sections.  Either one or both types of gradebooks can be enabled for a course. 

Section Level Gradebook Settings

This is the section level grading policies which can be accessed by each teacher unless the policy is locked at a higher level.

Manage Skill Sets

Starting at the School Office Menu, click the Manage Skill Sets link: 

 Then Click the appropiate link on the left.

Link Skills To Courses 

This allows you to edit particular years.  

This allows you to add or delete skills for a course. 

Allows you to change properties for skills and skill groups for a particular school year.

Manage Rubrics

Allows you to create or edit rubrics.

Mastery Level Calculator

Allows you to experiment with various calculations methods.