Gradebook Setup Guide
Editing the Student View
The student view of the gradebook is different to the Instructor view.
To edit the student view default settings - see below.
Addressing Student Questions about Gradebook
You can direct your students to the following guidance via the Student Help Manual Gradebook Explained guide
To access the course Gradebook, students must open their course page.
They need to navigate to the Dashboard icon (found to the top right of the page in the course banner) and open the student Dashboard.
This will open the Dashboard from which students can view assignments and other activities as well as open the Gradebook:
They can then select "Grades" option from the bottom three panels.
You can direct your students to the following guidance via the Student Help Manual Gradebook Explained guide.
The User Report view of the Gradebook has defaults set to look as follows:
Note: Hidden activities do not appear in the student gradebook view.
Default Settings:
If an Activity has been marked, students will see the grade for that item as both a Mark/Grade and a Percentage along with any Feedback provided.
- The Grade is the actual mark you received based upon the assignment's weight in the course.
- If you received an 80% on an assignment worth 10% of your total grade, it will read 8.00.
- If you received 65% on a 25% assignment, it will read 15.5. (15.5/25=65%).
- The Percentage is the percent score your received for the assessment.
- 80% and 65%, respectively
- Neither of these necessarily represent the actual score you received on the assessment.
- Your 10% assignment might have been graded out of 20points, so your score was actually 16 (16/20=80%).
- If your 25% assignment was graded out of 50, you would have a score of 31. (32.5/50=65%).
- The Category Total is the percent scored for the whole of that given category. It is not your entire grade and Categories should not be assumed to be equal.
- Referring to the example Course Outline Evaluation and Assessment breakdown shown below, the weekly activities total up to 50% of the total course grade while the Assignment category is only 20%.
- A score of 80% on the Category Total for Weekly Activities equals a 40% contribution to your Total Course Grade.
- Course Total appears at the very bottom of your gradebook and tells you the total percentage grade you have achieved in the course at a given time.
Editing the User Report / Student View
Aside from the show/hide Aggregation settings, all User Report settings are found under Grade Administration -> Setup -> Course grade settings
1. Show/Hide Category Aggregation
Caution: Do not remove the Course Total Aggregation Line from the Student View. You can explain to students that their final aggregation includes incomplete assessments and non-entered grades, so it will appear lower earlier in the semester.
You can remove the various Category Aggregation lines from your gradebook by using the hide/show function.
- Navigate to the Aggregation you wish to remove from view.
- From the edit dropdown, select "Hide"
- A hidden aggregation line will appear in blue on the Gradebook Setup page.
2. Grade Item Display Settings
First navigate to the Course grade settings page.
There are several modes of displaying your grades to students, the COTROnline default is "Real".
Real - the point score value of the grade out of the grade weight or scale. (ie. 19.50 - out of an item weighted at 25)
Percentage - the percent of the grade weight achieved (ie. 78.00%)
Letter - the letter grade based upon your course letter scale (ie. B+)
Combinations Look as Follows:
Real (percentage) = 19.50 (78.00%)
Percentage (letter) = 78.00% (B+)
Letter (real) = B+ (19.50)
etc.
3. Show/Hide Percentage Column
The default establishes a separate column to display the percentage achieved on the grade item. When using any combination involving Percentage in your grade display type, you will want to turn off this column.
Under Course grade settings -> User report, set Show percentage to Hide.
4. Display Course Average to Students
To add the course average to your gradebook, you can set the course average to show. The default setting is hide.
Caution: In small course numbers, students can fairly easily calculate their fellow student's grades from this average.
The Average will display in whatever format was selected for the Grade Item display type.