FTT - Common Schoology Gradebook Mistakes to Avoid

Common Schoology Gradebook Mistakes to Avoid

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

This is my 4th year at District 113, and with that, my once goofy little freshman rascals are now big bad seniors on the cusp of graduating. It's still weird seeing them in the hallway thinking, "wow, I cannot believe little Jimmy is going to college next year..." 

And with senior grade due dates upcoming, it's never too early to get our gradebooks in order. Here are some common Schoology Gradebook mistakes/misconceptions to look out for:

Category Calculations: Total Points vs. Percent

The Math department teachers were the ones (no surprise) who first discovered this mistake - when creating your categories, make sure you know the difference between Total Points and Percent. Many teachers, thinking this meant weighted vs. unweighted, chose "Percent" as their grading option. Here is the slight mathematical difference between the two grading styles. 

Let's say little Jimmy has two assessments, one worth 10 points, and one worth 100 points.

Percent:

• 9/10 = 90%
• 85/100 = 85%
• =(90%+85%)/2 = 87.5%

Total Points:

• 9/10 = 90%
• 85/100 = 85%
• =94/110 = 85.5%

The difference is subtle, but can be the difference can affect a lot of students. Be careful changing this setting deep into the semester, as it will change all of your student scores. 

Grading Scale:

This is a relatively simple fix, but important to remember: DO NOT USE NUMERIC as your gradebook scale. It will result in an error when grades are synced with Infinite Campus. You MUST use one of the provided scales. 

THSD 113 Rounded .5 vs. Round Period/Final Grades

There are two ways we can round your students' final grades - and by final we mean, the cumulative grade we see on the report card:

THSD 113 Rounded .5

This option should be a familiar one as it was the only method of rounding on Infinite Campus. Any grade above the .5 threshold will round up to the nearest letter grade. One caveat is that while the grade will round to the next letter grade, the numerical grade will stay the same

• 89.6% is worth an A-, but the grade will still show an 89.6%

Round Period/Final Grades

This is Schoology's default rounding system. So essentially it will round any value to the nearest percent. So basically every grade in your class will have a rounded value.

• 89.6% will turn into a 90%
• 89.4% will turn into an 89%

Infinite Campus - Schoology Sync?

Just to explain how grades go from one system to the other, what happens is every night at around midnight, Schoology will begin dumping their raw data to Infinite Campus. It takes about 3-4 hours for everyone's grades to sync to Infinite Campus. So what do I have to do in Infinite Campus when grades are due?

• Enter incompletes, drops, and other grading tasks.
• While you can manually change the final grades in both systems, in Infinite Campus you can change the letter value without changing the numeric value. 
• You can also enter final grade comments on both IC and in Schoology. 

Do you have any other thoughts on our Schoology Gradebook? Comment below!