Getting a single student cumulative average is imperative for any sort of transparency in the CBE grading system. Students, parents, AND teachers can't easily figure out how a student is doing overall in the class without extra downloads and calculations. I've been trying to make mastery grading work for a year and a half, and this lack of transparency on overall progress is THE MAIN REASON that I'm moving away from it next semester.

In answer to your question, Michael: the single student cumulative average using mastery skills can be customized by the teacher in very similar way as the regular gradebook that is currently visible to students in the "See Grade Detail" button. You can treat each Content-Based (or other) Skill like a Category and have all assessed skills weighted equally, or we could give different skills different weights.

Once BB gets a cumulative all-skills average for the student, then it would also be useful for there to be an automatic conversion to a letter grade (ex: on a 4-point scale, a current course average of between 3.31 and 3.69 would translate to an A-, or whatever conversion scale the school puts in).

Hey Folks -

We're actively investigating what this would look like in the product. The class average is something that we'll be introducing in some Student Gradebook enhancements that we have forthcoming this school year. Going back and adding it to Mastery Overview likely won't be too difficult of a task once the calculation has been constructed. The single student cumulative average, on the other hand, I'd like to get some feedback on how you would expect this number to be calculated.

If you'd like to set up a time to chat, feel free to reach out to me at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com

I wanted to follow up to see what "under consideration" meant. I have strung my teachers along with the "BB listens to us when we add things to the idea bank" and the fact that this is under consideration, but they are really struggling because they are trying to work in a system that does not easily tell them how their students are actually doing.

Melissa - When you say average for standard, do you mean an average of student performance on all the sub-skills that make up a standard (or "content area skill"?). That's what our teachers are looking for.

There's no easy way to see the average score on a particular standard for the entire class. It would be great to be able to see what the average score is on standard x.

We would also like to see the ability to average several standards together. For example, if I have several standards dealing with vocabulary, there's no way to average all of those standards together into one "vocabulary score". I'm currently having to export the data into a spreadsheet and run a set of functions to do that.

This is imperative for schools that want to be able to give realtime feedback to parents, ala the 'See Grade Detail' button.

Yes, the challenge to the export is the last time that I did it, the values came down as words because it was "4- Exemplary" instead of "4" so it does take a bit of extraction and magic to get a value out of the export. I have already given them that ability. They are struggling because they can do it for them but there isn't an easy way for their kids to see it. Yes, I know, their kids can just average their own from the Learning Mastery.

We will consider this, in the meantime since the mastery overview data is able to be exported to excel teachers can always extract it and add an average formula column seems a small thing to have to do in the interim versus scrapping using the whole app for CBE.

I am going to note that the first one is pretty make or break for my CBE teachers. Without it, they are looking to not use BB for CBE.