Wednesday, February 3, 2010

ANGEL Gradebook Tip: Points Versus Percentage

There is a lot of confusion about the ANGEL Gradebook modes called Points and Percentage. When you set up your grade book in ANGEL, you need to choose which grading scheme you will be using (Manage tab > Gradebook > Preferences > Gradebook Mode drop-down).

Points means that you assign a certain number of points to each activity in your class, then add up these points and divide by the total points possible to get each student’s final grade.

Percentage should actually be called weighted average. If you choose the Percentage mode, you assign a certain weight to each category of activities in your class, such as exams, homework, etc. When you do this, it does not matter how many points each activity is worth – the points in each category will be totaled and then weighted by the factor that you designate.

Note that even if you are using Points as your grading scheme, student grades can (and will) be expressed as a percentage. If a student gets 90 out of 100 on an exam, that’s still a 90% no matter which grading scheme you are using!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing to note when using a percentage-based gradebook is that this will only work if each of the columns are weighted equally in any particular category.

That is, a Quizzes category with 3 quiz columns means that quiz1, quiz2 and quiz3 are each worth 33.333% towards the final grade of that category.. you CANNOT make quiz1 worth '25%', quiz2 worth '50%' and quiz3 worth '25%' UNLESS you use them as the point value.

February 3, 2010 at 1:34 PM
Unknown said...

I asked Tracy Newman, Sr. Educational Technology Analyst who works for me at JCCC to comment: "In a sense it is correct. You cannot weight ASSIGNMENTS, you can only weight CATEGORIES. Therefore, he is correct that you cannot designate that quiz 1 is worth 25%, quiz 2 is worth 50% and quiz 3 worth 25%...but you CAN do this in effect by having each quiz worth a different amount of points. If you make quiz 1 worth 25 points, quiz 2 worth 50 points, and quiz 3 worth 25 points, then in effect you have weighted them the way you want."

"The flip side is that if you have a bunch of assignments in a single category that are each worth a different amount of points, there is a way using a special variable to weight each assignment equally within that category, so that one assignment does not contribute more to the final grade than any other assignment in that category."

February 7, 2010 at 5:38 PM

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