- Willamette
- Willamette Integrated Technology Services
- Wise
- Tools
- Gradebook2 Quick Start
WISE Gradebook2 Quick Guide
Introduction
Gradebook2 is the successor to the WISE Gradebook tool, providing powerful functionality for organizing and managing student grades. You can use Gradebook2 to:
- automatically collect grades from the Assignments, Forums and Tests & Quizzes tools
- define custom grade items
- account for excused assignments
- give extra credit to individual assignments
- automatically drop the lowest grade(s) for all students
- export to and import from .csv spreadsheet files
Gradebook2 Organization
When you open the Gradebook 2, you will see two panes. The left pane (1) will always display your gradebook structure - categories and gradebook items. The right pane (2) display changes depending on the work you are doing. The default view is a spreadsheet that lists all the students enrolled in the course on a white background. When you are editing categories or items or doing other work, the background of this pane will change to blue. Click the Close or Cancel button at the bottom of the pane to return to the spreadsheet view.
Gradebook Setup
Before you do any other work in the Gradebook, you need to set up your grading style. You have three choices:
- No Categories ("drop lowest grade(s)" feature not available)
- Categories
- Weighted Categories
You can choose to grade using:
- Points (every item has a specified number of points that are reported as the grade for that item)
- Percentages (every item is graded on a 0-100% scale, not recommended when using the Send to Gradebook function in Assignments, Forums or Tests & Quizzes)
- Letter Grades (not recommended when using the Send to Gradebook function in Assignments, Forums or Tests & Quizzes, not supported if importing grades from a spreadsheet)
Once you start to enter grades, you cannot change these parameters without deleting the grades and starting fresh.
The Display to Students box controls what information students see when they look at the gradebook. The Course grades option is calculated based on the items that have been graded to date and gives students a running view of their status.
Creating Categories
If you have chosen to use Categories or Weighted Categories, you need to create those categories. Click File>New Category or right click on Gradebook in the left pane and select Add new category. The New Category pane will guide you to enter the necessary information to create a category. If you are using Weighted categories, you will need to enter the percent of the total grade for the category. Use the Drop lowest box to enter the number of items to be excluded from grade calculations.
If you are using weighted categories, you have 3 choices for weighting:
- check the Weight items equally box - every item in the category will count the same in grade calculations
- check the Weight items by points box - the point value of each item will determine its weight in grade calculations (two items worth 100 and 50 points respectively would represent 66.66 and 33.33 percent of the category
- check neither box and specify the weight of each item within the category when you create the item
Creating Items
To create a new item, click File>New item or right click on a category name and select Add new grade item. The New Item pane will guide you through creating a gradebook item. If you are using weighted categories and did not select the weight equally or weight by points options when creating the category, you will see a box labeled % Category to enter the weight of the item you are creating.
Grading Items
To enter grades, check the box next to the name of the item(s) in the Grade Items pane. A column for each item will appear in the spreadsheet pane. Click in a cell of the spreadsheet and type in a grade; hit Enter or the down arrow key to move to the next student in the list. Grades are calculated automatically and will appear in the Course Grade column (students only see this information if Course Grade is selected in the Display to students section of the Gradebook setup).
Weighting Problems
The gradebook automatically calculates the percentages for categories and items within categories as you enter the data. You will see a warning in red This gradebook is not correctly weighted above the Grade Items pane and red numbers in the appropriate percentages column if everything does not add up to 100%. In this example, the categories need to be adjusted (or added to) to add up to 100%. The Homework category needs at least 1 item.
