ANGEL Tip: Students Not Seeing Their Grades

When students complain that they cannot see their grades in ANGEL, check the Release Date for all of your Categories in the Gradebook. The Release Date in the Gradebook is the date that you want the grades available to students. This automatically defaults to the day and time when you made the category so grades are immediately available. However, if you changed the date or were experimenting with settings, you may have changed this date accidentally.

To change the date so that students can see their grades, go to Manage > Gradebook > Categories. Select all of your categories using the checkboxes on the left. Click the Edit Selected button and check the box for Release Date. The date should then appear for the current day and time. Click Save. This will change the setting for all Categories at once, which you will be able to confirm by looking at the table of categories.

ANGEL Tip: Dropping the Lowest Grade

In the ANGEL Grade Book if you choose to drop the lowest grade, by using the “Drop Lowest” option for a Category, you may still want to see which grade was dropped (the ANGEL Grade Book does not show which grade was dropped). However, you can go to reports and run a report on a given student and the dropped items will appear in gray.

You may also wonder if a category is set to drop the lowest grade and there is an “extra credit” item in the category, will the extra credit item get dropped if it is lowest scored item? Or what if the extra credit item is not completed by the student? You would not expect extra credit items to be dropped and that is how ANGEL behaves. The extra credit item is not dropped.

ANGEL Gradebook Tips

When ANGEL calculates grades for students, only the assignments/assessments that have been graded are included in the average. This means that you need to fill in zeroes for any assignments/assessments that students did not turn in. There are a couple of options for how to accomplish this task.

1. After an assignment or assessment closes, go to the Gradebook , go to Enter Grades by Assignment , choose the assignment/assessment, and use Batch Update to enter a zero – only the students with no grade entered will be affected by the batch update, therefore it will give zeroes only to those who don’t already have a grade.
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2. At the end of the semester, when you are not accepting any more work, go back to the Gradebook preferences and check the box for “Treat ungraded items as zero .” This will fill in zeroes for any score that has not already been entered.

The benefit to the first method is that your students will see an accurate cumulative grade throughout the semester. You can always change a grade later if the student turns in the assignment and you accept late work. Using the second method at the end of the semester, even if you used the first method throughout the semester, can serve as a final check that all the zeroes have been entered.

If you notice that not all of your assignments or assessments are being used to calculate the final grade, the first thing you should check is the Gradebook Categories . If you have set a category to “Use highest 5 assignments” and there are six assignments in that category, one of the grades will be dropped. Likewise, if you set a category to drop the lowest 1 grade, one grade will be dropped. You can leave this setting at the default value of “Use all assignments” if you don’t want to drop any grades for that category. To change this setting, check the box next to the category, click Edit Selected , and then change the setting to use the number of grades desired.

Thanks to Tracy Newman, Ed Tech Center Sr. Analyst for compiling this information.