Hi Jackie,

Thanks for sharing and I agree that this looks great -- it has been the most requested feature from our faculty to be able to show the assignment grades only. I also appreciate the changes to the decimal point precision, and having those be flexible by division. I do have a question -- right now we have grade access required for advisors and optional for parents/students EXCEPT for one week during the mid-term, when we change the setting for students/parents from optional to required. Right now, when we go in and change that setting back to optional at the end of the week, the setting reverts to whatever the teacher selected at the beginning of the term. I hope the global setting on/off will continue to function that way with the new features.

Lastly, I assume that the demo of the Gradebook settings screen that showed "restrict teachers from making changes" referred only to the "Year/Marking Period" setting and not the "Gradebook Calculation" method, but I can't quite tell from the video. We have one-term only courses in our upper school, so I'd like to be able to restrict selecting the "year" option in gradebook setups, but still want teachers to be able to select whether to use percentages/total points in the calculation method.

Thanks again -- very happy to see these changes!

This looks so great! Thanks for sharing.

Granular control is KEY to wider adoption. Some schools will never want to share marks this way with parents while others will want to share everything. A platform that allows granular sharing control will win in this space.

Jackie this is great! I assume that if I set a default calculation method that a teacher can change it even though there is no option to check under default calculation to enable that. I can’t think why that would ever be something to lock down so I’m assuming they can just change it if they want a different method.
I have added it to our dept head agenda for next week to discuss switching to hiding the cumulative grade next year when we can.

Thanks!

Kelly

Sent from my iPhone

Hi Jackie!

Great work! I would love to see more granular control (by grade instead of school level) on the grade book setup for calculation period and method.
Like all the other changes and consolidations!

Seeing the good,
LT

Jackie- this is all stepping in the right direction.

Since your revamping:

Assignment TYPES by division- Lower School assignment types will be very different from Upper School; being able to differentiate them would be ideal.

For calculations, having an option for results OTHER than a percentage. In our lower school, for example, we don't want to see a gradebook cumulative showing an 85%. We use a simple 4 point scale, so seeing a 3.4 is much more helpful!

Hope these ideas make sense- happy to cross post them out, and really happy to see the direction this is heading!

@Jackie

My comments/questions were made after watching the video with no audio. If you answered any of them in the audio, never mind. I'll watch it again with audio later.

The audio wasn't working in my first post of the video.

Please try this one: https://www.screencast.com/t/8x4xuhZx 

Thanks!

Jackie

After about 10 years of multiple people at my school wanting this feature, I'm pleased to see that it is planned!  I hope it's available by the summer so I can set up our system to allow individual assignment grades to be shown without the cum then promote it to teachers so they can use the grade book next fall.

Regarding the prototype screens for grade access, if the "restrict teacher of class from changing setting" is not enabled, does the drop down for showing or hiding assignment grades then control the default for teachers' grade books if they don't change the setting?  Obviously, if restrict is enabled, all teachers will get the setting chosen by a sys admin via the drop-down.  If yes, to all of this, the interface seems pretty clear.

Since there is a "restrict teacher" features, I assume teacher will also have the option to turn off/on showing the cum to their class if it is not restricted by a sys admin?

As opposed to having to set the school level default/restrictions for each marking period, I'd like to be able to set it for the entire academic year.  I can't think of why we'd ever want it different for different marking periods within a particular school level/division, but if there is a need for that, maybe all terms default to the first term settings then it can be overridden later.

Also, whether you can set an entire year or have to do it by term, will these settings migrate as the default to the next year when created? My hope is yes. Otherwise, this is a setting someone has to remember to do each year when they are probably just going to make it the same as the previous year anyway.

This is also desperately needed here at Flintridge Prep.

There is, however, another workaround, other than setting Assignment point values to zero:

One other idea for hiding the cumulative percentage from your students (while still showing them what they got on each Assignment):

If you’re willing to (temporarily) hide the cumulative percentage from yourself in the bargain, do this:

In your Gradebook, go to Edit Setup.

Then, for each Quarter, set the Calculation method back to “—Select—“.

Then click “Save and Close” at the bottom.

This will make it so that the system doesn’t know how to arrive at the cumulative percentage, and so it won’t show the percentage to the student.

Then, you could always come back in to Edit Setup only during those times when you need the cumulative calculation, and set the Calculation method back to whichever method you use, click Save and Close, and the calculated percentage will show up.

If you do this, you will need to re-set the weights/percentages assigned to each Assignment Type, too, each time you want it to calculate the percentage for you.

Am I right about this? Anyone think of any reason why this wouldn't be a good idea?

Agreed for all of the reasons mentioned. 

Being able to control what grades are visible is a MUST

This is a source of frustration for our teachers. The only reason we're not publishing the assignment grades to our students automatically is so that we can hide the cumulative grades. Making all assignments worth 0 points is not an option for us. Our teachers want an actual cumulative grade...they just don't want our students obsessing over their average grade in each class. 

Agreed. The cumulative grade can be deceiving in certain cases when there are other factors going into the students' final report grades. The workaround we are using right now is to make all assignments worth 0 points, so that the cumulative grade always calculates to 0%.