An instructional video is included for this subject. This instructional video will provide a step-by-step explanation about how you can create a grade category. Below the video you will find the written manual.
If you want to have an orderly grade book you can use Categories. These categories can be used to group similar grade items. For example, you can create categories in the grade book for tests, assignments, quizzes and so on. These similar grade items will now be grouped together, which will give you an orderly overview. The grade items within a category do not have to have the same weight (for example, the category Quizzes can weigh 10% for the final grade of the course, but within this category there could be two quizzes that contribute to the final quiz grade differently. Quiz 1 could make up 60%, and quiz 2 40%).
Categories are not the course components you assess; the parts you assess are the grade items that you use to fill the categories.
Creating grade categories
- Click Administration in the navbar of your course.
- Click Grades. You will navigate to the Manage Grades tab, also known as your grade book.
If you navigate to Grades, you will automatically land on the Manage Grades tab. You can use settings if you want to navigate to a different tab instead.
- Click New.
- Then click Category.
The following steps are applicable to a weighted grade book because the weighted grading system is used most frequently at the Radboud University.
- Give the category a name (for example Assignments).
- Give the category a shortened name (for example Assign). The shortened name will be displayed when you enter grades using Enter Grades. Using a shortened name saves space.
- Click Show Description to fold out the html-editor and to add a short description of the category, for example to explain what components are part of the category.
- Select Allow users to view description if you want students to see the description.
- Use Grading to assign a certain weight to the category (the total percentage all of the assignments in this specific category contribute to the final grade of the course):
- Enter a number (1-100) under Weight.
- Select Allow category grade to exceed category weight if you want students to be able to get a score higher than 100% in this category.
- You can use Distribution to determine how the items are weighed within the category:
- Make sure Manually assign weight to items in the category is selected if you want to determine the weight of each grade item in a category manually. Choose this option if the grade items within the category have a different weight (for example: the first assignments weighs 20%, the second 30% and the third 50%). Note that you have to adjust the distribution manually for each grade item you add if you choose this option.
- Select Distribute weights by points across all items in the category to attribute a weight to each item that is similar to the number of points the assignment is worth. When you add new grade items to the category the weights will be automatically recalculated. Note that this option does not allow you to change the weight of the grade items manually (for example: if students can get X out of 10 points for assignments one and two, and X out of 20 points for assignment three, assignments one and two will automatically be assigned a weight of 25% and assignment three a weight of 50%).
- Select Distribute weight evenly across all items if you want all items within a category to have the same weight. When a new grade item is added the weights will automatically be recalculated in order to guarantee an even distribution (for example: assignment one and two both weigh 50%, but if you add a third assignments all three of these assignments will now weigh 33.3%). You can also choose to omit the lowest or highest scores of a student when the final grade for the category is calculated. You have to choose whether it is the highest or the lowest score you want to emit.
Use Display Options to choose what students can and cannot see:
- Select Display class average to users to give students access to the group average.
- Select Display grade distribution to users to show students a visual representation of how the grades have been distributed among the group.
- Select Override display options if you want the display options for this category to be different from what you previously set up (while using the grade wizard setup) for the total grade book. You can override the display options by using Show to select or deselect which parts of the category you want to show to students (Points grade, Weighted grade, Grade scheme symbol en Grade scheme color).
- Check your selections and click:
- Save and close to save thids category and return to the grade book.
- Save and New to save this category and create a new one.
- Save to save this category and continue working on it
- Cancel to cancel your changes.
You are now ready to attach grade items to the categories, which you can then attch to activities in order to assess course components.