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 course 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. Inherit means that the course inherits from the school level policy and the section inherits from the course level policy. School and Course level settings are copied from the prior year when prior year settings exist. Section level settings stay with the section, as sections only exist for a single year (or less).  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. 

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 security privilege to 'Manage School and Course Gradebook Settings'. 

Locking and Unlocking

School and Course level settings can be “locked” which prevents teachers from overriding them. 

Locking at the School or Course level will force all lower levels to inherit the locked setting.

If the gradebook security is unlocked, teachers can modify the settings.

If the gradebook security is locked, teachers can't modify the settings (unless they have been granted the admin security privilege to 'Manage School and Course Gradebook Settings').   

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

These settings can be customized for each course but it is generally better to use a consistent policy for the school district.

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).

Standards Overall Grading Policy
 

Standards Based Gradebook marks are not based on points, like the traditional Letter Gradebook marks. 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 "Standards 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.

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%.

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.

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 the teacher unless the policy is locked at a higher level.