The Grade Center in myCourses is the digital equivalent of a traditional paper grade ledger book. The Full Grade Center page automatically generates a row for each student in a course. You can add columns to the grade center by creating graded activities in your course site (e.g. assignments, tests, graded discussions) or by creating columns manually. It can even calculate averages and final grades! Watch the video embedded below to go on a quick tour of the Full Grade Center.
Columns
The Grade Center is made up of rows of student names and columns where you can record the grades they earn for activities and assessments. The rows are automatically generated based on your roster, but you are in control of creating and managing the columns. Most columns that you work with will be for recording grades, but special “calculated columns” can be created to calculate averages and final grades based on the grades you have entered in other columns.
Creating a Column
This video demonstrates how to create a “manual” column in the grade center. This type of column would be created to record grades for work that students submitted in-class, or for graded items that have no deliverable to submit such as participation or attendance.
You do not need to create columns for work that students submit through myCourses.
Columns are automatically created when you add graded activities (e.g. discussions, tests, assignments, blogs, journals) to content areas in your course site. Head over to our Help for Faculty page for tutorials on creating places for students to submit work in myCourses.
Creating Calculated Columns
Calculated Columns use the grades you have entered in the grade center to calculate final grades, averages, or the sum of several grades. There are a few types of calculated columns:
- Average Column – Calculate the average of a selection of grade columns/categories.
- Minimum/Maximum Column – Display the highest or lowest grade given a range of grade columns/categories.
- Total Column – Calculate the sum of all points earned for a selection of grade columns/categories.
- Weighted Column – Allows instructors to assign percentage weights to selected grade columns/categories in order to calculate a weighted final/overall grade.
Organizing Columns
You are able to organize the columns in the Full Grade Center so that they are displayed in the order you would like them to appear.
Calculating a Weighted Final Grade
Creating a weighted column that calculates the final/overall grade for each of your students is one of the most useful features of the grade center. Columns and categories (groups of columns) can have percentage “weights” applied to them according to the grade breakdown in your syllabus. For example:
- Quizzes 25%
- Homework 25%
- Final Exam 40%
- Participation 10%
The Final Exam and Participation grades would each be single grades that live in their own columns. All you need to do is apply the appropriate percentage weight to those columns.
However, the average of all quiz grades and the average of all homework grades each make up 25% of the grade. To weight the average of a group of grades like this, you would create grade categories for each average. That means you need to create a category for “Homework” and a category for “Quizzes.” You would then associate all quiz grades with the “Quizzes” category and associate all homework grades with the “Homework” category. You can then apply the appropriate percentage weights to each category when you are creating the final grade weighted column. Watch the video below to see this process of this in action.
Publishing final myCourses grades to COIN
Now that you have configured your Gradebook you can publish your final letter grades to COIN.