In Oncourse Gradebook, how are course grades calculated?

Note: Letter grades in Gradebook are referred to as non-calculating grades. Non-calculating grades may be any string of text up to eight characters. If you want your grades calculated automatically, you must enter them as either points or percentages. See Changing the grade entry, type, and scale in Gradebook.

The Gradebook tool automatically calculates a course grade based on the number of points or percent values scored out of the total of all values submitted (i.e., a running grade). Ungraded items will not be included in the course grade calculation, so the course grade will not necessarily reflect the student's true score. To include ungraded items in the course grade calculation, you need to enter a 0 (zero) for those items.

Gradebook provides native support for percentage scores. For example, a score of 90% will be stored in the database as 90% (or .9) regardless of the relative weight assigned to the item. The "Gradebook Item Relative Weight" value determines the proportional relationship among items in the same category (for gradebooks with categories) or among all items (for gradebooks without categories). Thus, an item with a relative weight of 3 counts three times more than an item with a weight of 1, or 1.5 times more than an item with a weight of 2.

To exclude a Gradebook item from the course grade, you can edit the Gradebook item and deselect Include this item in course grade calculations. The score for that item will appear in parentheses to indicate that it is not included in the course grade calculation.

Note: Students can't see their grades for an item unless you select Release this item to students when editing the Gradebook item.

Instructors can also:

• Use the Adjustment Gradebook item type to assign extra credit or to adjust a student's score. See Giving extra credit or a grade penalty in Gradebook.
• Drop the lowest or highest grade(s) from a category; see Dropping the lowest or highest grade from a category in Gradebook.

Note: If you use points and have imported Gradebook items with Gradebook Item Point Values less than or equal to 0 (zero), those Gradebook items will not be included in the course grade calculation. (You cannot create an item with a value of less than or equal to zero in the Gradebook.)

For instructions on adding or editing Gradebook items, see Adding, editing, or deleting a Gradebook item.