GRADE BOOK GRADING CAVEAT & UPDATE

Here’s a grading scenario that doesn’t work in ANGEL: A faculty member was using the Drop Box but not recording points (e.g., 85 out of 100), but was attaching a marked up file and/or including text in the comment box. She also selected the option to send to mail. When she clicked OK, she received an error message every time. She then logged in as a student, because she weren’t sure if her students were or were not getting the messages and files she was trying to send. As a student, she made a submission; then, returned as the professor and wrote a message in the box without entering a grade; the error message appeared as it did with other students. Then, she went back into the course to see if her "student view" displayed the comments or if she had a mail message; the comments did not appear and the email never came.

When grading in a Drop Box, if you leave the grade blank it generates a type mis-match error message. This has been reported to ANGEL. While the error is not very descriptive, it’s trying to signal that you need a grade in the field to continue. So the process includes these steps:

1. Open the course.
2. Go to Lessons and select the Drop Box ready for grading.
3. Grade a student’s work and leave the grade blank.
4. You see the error message.
5. Entering any number including 0 in the field will prevent the error.

This issue is addressed in the July 2009 ANGEL 7.3 Patch, which is currently being tested in a pre-production environment at JCCC. The July patch does appear to correct this problem so an error is not generated when faculty do not enter a grade but include comments on a Drop Box assignment.

Grades Not Showing For Students

At JCCC, we’ve identified situations when students go to the Report tab and select Grades > Student Grades, but all grades are not visible for some students. Other students can satisfactorily view their grades. If the student selects Learner Profile > Gradebook Grades, then all grades are visible (although this does display the class average which some instructors do not like). The student who cannot view their grades can still go to the Drop Box to see their grades and the grades do show in the Gradebook. We’ve verified that the grades/assignments are not hidden and the Calculation Type is set correctly.

The problem was identified by ANGEL Support as a result of extraneous HTML code in the Comments field for the grade. The code causes a portion of the report to be truncated and not displayed. If the instructor cleans up or removes the unnecessary code, the entire report displays properly.

To avoid this problem, we recommend that when you compose text in Word (to paste into the Comments field) that you first copy the text into Notepad (which strips out the extra code) and then paste the comments into the Comments field.