Creating Grading Categories

Grading Categories allow you to apply different grade settings to groups of activities within the same course. Create Grading Categories in Course Settings and place activities in the desired category when you create them.

Create Grading Categories

1. Open the Editor. 
2. Select Course settings from Tools in the toolbar.
3. Select the Grading Categories card.
4. From here, you can:
   • Check the Use weighted categories box to enable an editable numeric weight field next to each grading category listed (not available for courses using Multi-Outcome Scoring).
   • Add grading category.
   • Select the category name to open the Category details box for existing categories to:
     • Change the category Name.
     • Change the category Weight (if using weighted categories).
     • Choose whether you want to drop any number of the lowest scores in the category.
     • Check the Display score for students as box(es) to indicate they way(s) you want student performance displayed for the category: Points, Percent (%), Letter grade, and/or Minutes spent.
     • Select to remove grading category. There is no warning dialogue when this option is selected. If  a category is accidentally removed, leave the Course Settings screen without saving. 
     • Check the All activities are extra credit box for the category.
       • NOTE: Any weighted category marked as Extra Credit is equivalent to making its weight 0, which means any item in that category does NOT contribute to the final course score. Such a configuration is counter-intuitive especially if you name the category "Extra Credit."

Select Save.

Weighted categories

The category weight value defines the impact the activity grades in that category have on the final grade relative to the other categories in the same course. Activity scores within a category contribute to the category score, which is factored by the category weight when computing the overall course score.

Example: Assume you create two categories:

• Quizzes with a 750 grade weight and two quizzes worth 10 points each.
• Homework with a 250 grade weight and three activities worth 10 points each.

Because of the grade weights, even though all the activities are worth 10 points each, the quizzes contribute more to the course grade:

• Quizzes are worth 75% of the course grade (750 / (750+250)).
• Homework is worth 25% of the course grade (250 / (750+250)).

If a student were to get perfect scores on the quizzes, and zeros on all the homework activities:

• With weighted categories, the student's final score is computed as (20/20 * .75) + (0/30 * .25) = 0.75.
• Without weighted categories, the student's final score would be computed as (20/50) = 0.40.