Wednesday, June 24, 2009

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.
    or,
  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.

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