How to Avoid Gradebooks Challenges

Category: Centre for Professional and Part-time Learning

We know that many of you have encountered frustrating and time consuming gradebook challenges at some point in your teaching career.  Every semester we help multiple students with their questions on how to interpret gradebooks and ultimately understand their final grades.   We also support many facilitators to properly enter marks into gradebooks so that the final grade is calculated correctly.  As such, we want to identify   the top two gradebook issues and how to avoid them.

#1. The gradebook continually auto calculates the student’s final grade based on the completed assessments and ignores the assessments that have no mark.

Why is this important? – If a student only completes the first assignment and gets 5/5 the student’s final grade will display as 100% in the course.  It will not change until additional grades are entered.  This is the number one problem with the gradebook.

If the facilitator does not enter zeros for the remaining assessments the student’s final mark will display as 100% in the course.

It is common for a facilitator to forget to enter a mark of zero for a missed assignment.  Alternatively, when entering multiple grades, facilitators can sometimes miss a grade entry.  These occurrences result in an inflated overall grade for the student.

How to avoid the issue: Ensure a mark is entered for every student for every assessment.  If the student did not submit anything be sure to enter a mark of zero.  This will ensure that the student’s final grade is calculated correctly.

#2. Entering marks into the OntarioLearn gradebook. 

All courses offered through OntarioLearn have a secondary step every facilitator must complete. They must duplicate the gradebook in the “OntarioLearn Grades System -Release 2”.

Why? – Other schools do not have access to our course shells.  The “OntarioLearn Grades System -Release 2” is the only location they can retrieve the grades for their students.

How to avoid the issue: The OntairoLearn gradebook must include a breakdown of all the individual assessment marks and the final grade.  Facilitators must ensure that the grades add up correctly.   Each semester, we provide instructions to facilitators via email to support this process.

Facilitators are asked to double check all marks to ensure all assessments for each student are entered correctly into the OntarioLearn Grades System.  Be sure to enter a zero for missing assignments.   We have also created two training videos to demonstrate how to enter the marks into the OntarioLearn Grades System.  There are two separate ways to enter the marks, online and offline, see the videos below:

  1. Offline (import the grades using a spreadsheet) video here
  2. Online (enter grades directly into the system) video here

We also held a seminar recently on the topic of “Effective Grading Practices” which can further support facilitators when managing gradebooks.  See seminar recording here.

We hope this information is helpful.  If you have any questions, please reach out to your manager for more support.