No calculation, total points, category weights



Grades Module Specs – revised May 16, 2006 10:30 AM

Menu items (actual wording might change):

o Gradebook

o Gradable Items

o Categories

o Final Grades

o Release

o Import/Export

Gradebook:

o Looks like a spreadsheet

o Rows are students

o Click on a student to enter/view grades for that student

o Columns are gradable items

o Click on a column heading to enter/view grades for all students re: that gradable item

o Column headings should show info about that item:

▪ What category?

▪ Max Points

▪ Is extra credit?

o Cells are the actual grades.

o Last Columns are automatically generated final grades: one column expresses final grade as a percentage, next column expresses final grade as a letter grade

Gradable Items

o Each gradable item contains:

o Due date (is this necessary? How would it be used?)

o Item name- must be unique? Size/char limits?

o Maximum Points possible – an integer >= 0

o Category this item belongs to

o Extra Credit has three options (see separate section for more info)

▪ yes, and show to all students

▪ yes, and show only to students who have received a grade for the item

▪ no

o Enter as letter grade?

Teachers can specify that a particular item will receive a letter grade (E.g. A, B-, D, etc). When a letter grade is used:

o The teacher must also specify a list of letter grade to numeric grade translations. E.g. A = 95, B+ = 82, and so on.

o This translation table applies to this item only.

o The Maximum points possible item will automatically be determined to be the same as the highest numerical value in the letter grade translation list.

o When entering a grade for this item, the teacher will have access to a drop-down list of the letter grades.

▪ Valid entries are as defined in ‘Letter Grades Specification’

▪ When activated, grade entry becomes drop-down list.

▪ Internally, system assigns a numeric grade as specified in the ‘Letter Grades Specification’

o Deleting an item – permanently deletes all grade entries for that item.

o Hiding an item – retains data, but that item is not used in calculating final grades.

Categories:

o A category contains:

o Unique category name

o A list of current members

▪ Can click on a member to get to that item’s edit page? Not necessary?

o A % Weight – an integer from 0 to 100

o Drop X lowest scores – kicks in when X + 1 scores are available, extra credit items are ignored. (See additional notes below re: dropping lower scores)

o A new gradebook starts with one category, named ‘General’ with 100% weight

o The sum of the weights must ALWAYS be 100%

o Categories can be edited/added/deleted

o A category can be deleted only when:

▪ It has no item members (user must use the Items menu to change the items to another category)

▪ It has been assigned a weight of 0%

o Note a category can have a 0% weight. When using either the Category weight OR THE BASIC POINTS system, a weight of ZERO indicates that items in the category are not graded. To simplify things for the user, it may be useful to provide an “Ungraded” checkbox. When checked, the weight automatically changes to zero, and when a weight is set to ‘0’, the box is automatically checked.

Final Grades has THREE sub-sections:

1. General Scoring Method:

o Do not calculate a final grade (This is the default selection.)

o Point based system:

Final grade = total points scored / total possible points

o Category weighted system. E.g. Quizzes are worth 25%, Exams 25% Final Exam 10% and so on.

Category score = (points earned / possible points) * weight%

Final score = sum of all category scores.

2. Rounding radio button:

o Mathematically round final percent to a whole number (round up or down)

o Round to nearest tenth (this is the default setting)

3. Final Letter Grades Specification:

Final grade will be expressed both as a percentage and a letter grade.

Provide facility for defining letter grade scale.

A+

A

A-

B+

B

B-

C+

C

C-

D+????

D?????

D-?????

F

o Do not make any assumptions re: the letters used, or their order. “Letters” should actually be free-form strings to allow, for example, “Pass”, “Fail”, or “OSU” (Outstanding, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory)

Release

o This new grades system, when activated, will entirely replace the old menu. This means that items such as “who has opened their grades”, “view all grades” “view one student’s grades” etc. will appear under the teacher’s Release menu.

o What should students see?

o When should they see it? Release it now? Snapshot release – move back to previous X snapshots?

Export

o Initially, system will only allow export from Gradebook to CSV

o Import from CSV to Gradebook will be considered as a future enhancement

Additional Info

Entering grades:

• Enter a number (or select value from drop down list, if letter grades are used)

• Numbers entered can be:

o Floating point e.g. 97.23

o Negative

o Greater than the maximum number of points for that item

• A comment can be entered for each grade

Dropping lowest scores:

o Controlled within the category definition.

o Kicks in only when student has been assigned at least x+1 grades for gradable items in that category.

o Extra credit items are not considered when dropping the lowest score

o A lowest score is actually calculated as the lowest percentage = total correct/total possible points.

Suppose a ‘Quiz’ category has an item with 10 as the maximum score, and another item with 100 as the maximum number of points. A student scores a perfect 10 on the first quiz, and an 80 on the second quiz. For the purpose of dropping the lowest score, the 80/100 is lower than the 10/10, even though the raw score of 10 is much lower than 80

o Internally, it is treated as if that item was never assigned.

o Should show which grades were dropped (e.g. using color) on all grades displays

Pending vs ‘0’ grade?

o A pending grade is treated as if that item was never assigned.

o Allows the final grade to be calculated based on work done to-date. Suppose teacher sets up all of the gradable items in advance. At the start of the semester, all students would see a final grade of ‘F’ if they were initially assigned a ‘0’ for each gradable item. If items start off as ‘pending’ students would start off with an undefined final grade. When they take the first quiz, they might see a final grade of ‘A’ or ‘B’ or whatever.

o All gradable items start off with a pending grade.

o When scoring an item, must have available a ‘convert pending grades to ‘0’? option. Or does this happen only when grades are released to the students (see next)?

o When releasing grades, maybe should ask the same question For items that were completed by one or more students, convert pending grades to ‘0’?

o Internal representation? might be a grade with a large negative (or positive?) number

o Teacher must be able to change a grade back to ‘pending’.

Excusing a student from an assignment:

o Teacher can excuse a student using a checkbox on the grading form

o An excused item is treated as if the item was never assigned for that student.

o Behaves much like ‘pending’ except teacher is never asked to convert these scores to zero grades.

o If that category has the ‘drop x lowest grades feature’ enabled, an excused item is NOT considered as one of the lowest grades. It’s as if the item was never assigned.

o Internal representation?

Extra credit:

o Any gradable item may be designated as an extra credit item.

o Points scored on extra credit items are added to the overall point total for that category, but the “total possible points” is not added to the total possible points for that category. This seems to mean it doesn’t matter what the total possible points value is set to when creating an extra credit item.

o Extra credit items are not considered when dropping the lowest X grades.

o Extra credit items can be hidden from the spreadsheets of students who have not been assigned a grade for that item. This makes it possible to make an extra credit assignment available to only a select group of one or more students.

Ungraded Items

It sometimes could be useful to have an item that behaves as an ‘ungraded’ item. For example, the teacher might want to use the program to track absences, tardiness, or who completed a particular task.

This can be achieved by creating a category (you can call it “Not Graded”) with a 0% weight. An item with a 0% weight is ignored completely by the final grade calculation.

These ungraded items should be clearly marked in the Gradebook spreadsheet view.

Unsolved problems/future enhancements

o WNEC has midterm grades. Can create this as an ungradable item, and fill it in manually.

o How will final (and maybe Midterm) grades be transferred to the Student Info System?

o Attendance tracking – an ungradable item (maybe called Absences) can be used to record absences. The comments section for the grades can be used to record the actual dates of the absences.

o Database files should be backed up? It would be nice to keep the last ‘x’ copies of changes, or maybe a ‘revert to last distributed’ option.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download