Tip & Bug Report: Gradebook Setting

With our current version of ANGEL (7.3) there’s a Gradebook setting you don’t want to use. If you select Manage tab > Gradebook > Preferences, you’ll see the Show Grades for Dropped Students checkbox option. Don’t select it. This has always been the recommendation during iTeach Online training sessions (offered for JCCC fcaulty at the college). By default the setting is unchecked and there is no reason for faculty to ever check it because students who drop a course (in Banner--our system is integrated with our SIS) are automatically dropped from the course in ANGEL (so their grades won’t show no matter what you do). If the student is reinstated, all their work and grades reappear intact.

The bug is this: if you select the option, students who have not dropped will (randomly) disappear from your Gradebook. They’ll appear in the class Roster, just not in the Gradebook.

ANGEL Tip – Copying Your Gradebook Settings

If you need to copy your Gradebook settings from one course or section to another, but you don’t want to copy the whole course, you can use a handy tool called the Copy Gradebook Settings tool.

Go to a course that does NOT already have your Gradebook set up. Click on the Manage tab and then on the Gradebook link. Then click on the Preferences link. At the top of this screen, there is a link to the Copy Gradebook Settings tool. Click on the link.

Be sure you are in a course that does NOT already have the settings you want! Note the warning text at the top of the screen: “This tool will erase current settings and replace them with settings from the selected course. Use with caution! There is no way to get back your settings after replacing them.”

From the drop-down menu, choose the course that has the Gradebook settings that you want. Select which items you want to copy (you probably want to select all of them). Click the Copy Settings button. That’s it – you’re done!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for writing up this tip.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Assignment Tab for ANGEL Content Items

When creating a content item in ANGEL, the Assignment tab has two subsections. The first is for Milestone Settings, which is all about the Calendar and Tasks. When you create a milestone, you are essentially creating an entry in the student’s task list. You can choose either Manually Marked, which means the student will check off the box when they have completed the task, or Item Completion, which means that ANGEL will mark the check box when the student has completed the task. The task list can be viewed in the navigation panel on the left side of the screen. Whether or not the student uses this task list to track assignment is up to each student. In addition, under the Task Type, you can set Assign and Due dates which will automatically create entries in the ANGEL Calendar. These dates have nothing to do with when the content item is visible or when it is accessible to the student – the only place these dates show up is the Calendar.

The second section on the Assignment tab is the Gradebook Settings section. These settings are for linking the content item to the Gradebook. You can either create the assignment in this tab, or choose an existing assignment from the Gradebook. In the Calculation Type field, you need to be careful when choosing Manual. You would choose Manual if the assignment is one that ANGEL can’t grade, such as an essay. However, if the content item is a discussion forum, you don’t want to choose Manual or you would be unable to copy the grades to the Gradebook and would instead have to open the Gradebook and record them manually.

Getting the Gradebook Wizard Back

During this week’s training on the ANGEL Gradebook, the question was asked “can you go back and use the ANGEL Gradebook Wizard after you initially choose to skip the wizard (Manage > Gradebook > Skip Wizard button)?

Our initial answer based on research (see http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/node/89) was “no, you can’t.” You can simulate the wizard by going through the Gradebook options in this order:

• Gradebook > Preferences
• Gradebook > Categories
• Gradebook > Assignments
• Gradebook > Grading Scale

However after follow-up research (checking ANGEL online Help), we found this note: “If the Gradebook Wizard no longer appears, you can reactivate it by deleting all categories set up. Generally this is not a good idea, but good to know if someone has been testing it out but not really setting up the categories and assignments needed and wants to start over again.”

Thanks for Bob Epp and Michael Rea for their research.