Grading and Gradebook
This Friday will bring more changes to better improve the Educator experience for you and your students. There are actually two significant changes that have come from our reading on the Educator Facebook page and/or dialogues with some of you. There are many more in the pipeline, so stay tuned here at least once a week.
NUMBER ONE
Here’s a short story. A student is presented an assignment that includes BOTH short-answer work AND an essay/paragraph response within the same assignment. The student did some of the work (the short answers), but he/she needed more time to complete the written portion. The view in the gradebook was averaged by reflecting a zero (zip! zilch! nothing!) on the essay portion. This might certainly cause panic in the student’s household, when reviewing student grades. It might also cause you to see alleged grades that were not complete. This has been changed to make life a bit less stressful for all.
As we go forward, the student’s assignment/exam grade will NOT be visible UNTIL the teacher (you!) has finished grading the ENTIRE submission. This will hopefully reduce the number of false alarms in the FLVS and franchise neighborhoods.
NUMBER TWO
Adding the school of record to your students’ gradebook apparently could be very useful for many teachers. This certainly applies to the VLL teachers, which is where this request originated. It will not get in the way of anyone who does not need or want this functionality.
So, beginning tomorrow (Friday) there will be a new, sortable column in your NEW GRADEBOOK. You will now be able to sort by the students’ school of record, if any:
For those of you who use the export feature there, the school of record will be present as a new column field (School) in your spreadsheet as well:
Leave your comments here, if you like. Add your thoughts to the Educator Facebook page. See? We do read them! We will get around to improving your experience one step at a time … or maybe even two. See you soon.
YAHOOOOIEEE Thank you
I am loving the improvements. May I offer a suggestion? When you choose to “show grades” on the Student screen, it would be more helpful to see % complete and Current % rather than points earned. Showing 200 points earned does not tell me much (especially when teaching 3 courses with different point values in each course and different for honors and regular).
Thanks for your appreciation and suggestion. We truly welcome and enjoy the feedback.
Regarding your percentage suggestion, unless I am not understanding correctly, this has been implemented already.
Look here: http://educator.ucompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/percentage.gif
Might this address your suggestion?
Meanwhile … be sure to visit our Educator Facebook page when you can. I think you will enjoy some of the dialogue there.
No, I was referring to viewing the list of students in the course. There is an option that says “Show Grades” but it shows total points only. Also, another suggestion would be to have honors or regular noted in the Grade Book view. I like to exempt exams that are not needed to avoid students taking the wrong exam. However, currently I have to use a printout of honors v. regular to do this.
These are great improvements! I would also like to see a column in the Student Grade Report for the number of times an assignment has been submitted. This would help when talking to student and parent to glance quickly and know how many times an assignment was submitted and resubmitted. Thanks!
I agree with Anna – I would love to know how many times an assignment is reset in an easy place. I would also love the blank assignments to automatically be set to “ex” so we don’t have to manually score each one to get the percentage complete to hit 100%.
Yes, Anna! This would be fantastic for the parent (and teacher) to see. I have students who will just resubmit a blank assignment so that it’s counted in their progress reports, and I feel this would also help with that problem. Thanks!
Hi,
I think that students should only be able to resubmit work if they got a “D” or below on it. By continuous resubmission of work…students stay in the class way too long.
Peter,
I’m loving all of these awesome improvements (and fun presentation of them in the blog!). This has probably been suggested before, but is there any way we can enlarge the teacher comments box? It expands for the students view, but when grading (and re-grading) this is extremely difficult to view and type in the tiny box provided.
Also, if there was a more obvious button to show the students that we have given them feedback. For example, most of my students (particularly the new ones) aren’t aware that I spend countless hours commenting on their work. If there was a large/colorful button next to each assignment to make this more obvious, I think we would have more students encouraged to complete their work.
Thanks again,
Alex
I am loving the school names in the gradebook!
Thank you so much!
Would it be possible to display the students’ letter grades for them in their Gradebook. In the past, we could add that feature but then we were told it wasn’t allowed. Do you know why or if it would be possible to have that added? When students look at their grades, it isn’t so clear for them. They have to learn to look at their “current percentage” and they are still getting confused or don’t bother to try to figure it out.
Thank you so much for addressing our needs. I appreciate your efforts.