To support consistent grading practices across courses, Pearson Connexus allows administrators to define school years at the domain level and configure grading periods within those years.
- A school year in Pearson Connexus represents a defined date range, typically aligned to an academic year or grade-level curriculum. Because school calendars vary by district, administrators can configure any custom start and end dates to reflect their local schedule.
- A grading period in Pearson Connexus is a defined date range within a school year during which student work is evaluated and an overall grade is issued for that period. For example, if a district divides its academic year into four quarters, an administrator would configure four grading periods within the school year, and students would see a separate overall grade for each quarter.
When School years are defined for a domain, you can select one when creating a course. The new course's Start date and End date are automatically populated to match those of the selected school year. You can change a course's School year in Course settings, but the Start date and End date are not automatically changed.
If the selected School year has grading periods included, any new course created in the domain can use those grading periods by default. As teachers create gradable activities in the course, they can assign them to grading periods and their scores are included in that period.
When using domain grading periods, administrators must ensure that the appropriate current Grading Period is selected at the domain level, so that courses record and report grading data within the correct time frame.
When possible, create school years and grading periods for your domain before creating courses, so that the courses can use them by default. If you are using or copying courses that existed before defining a school year and grading periods, teachers can map their grading periods to the new domain settings.
Additional articles for teachers:
- Manage Grading Periods
- Create multiple grading periods within one course (For use where grading periods are not defined at the domain)
Create a School Year and Grading Periods for Your Domain
- Open the Actions (three vertical dots) menu in the toolbar of Domain Details.
- Select Domain Settings.
- Select Add on the School years and Grading periods card.
- Define your School year by providing:
- A Title for the school year.
- If you're defining a school year starting in 2021 and ending in 2022, you might use 2021–2022.
- Start Date and End Date for the school year.
- A Title for the school year.
- Create and define your Grading periods. Select Add to create new Grading periods and provide:
- A Title
- Start Date
- End Date
- Select Done.
- Check the Enable weighted periods and final course score if you want to be able to roll up the grades from all of your Grading periods into one final Course score. Doing this allows teachers to weight some Grading periods more than others.
- When this box is unchecked, students and teachers can see individual Grading Period scores, but never seen them combined as a Course Score.
- When this box is checked, students and teachers have access to both the Grading Period scores and a Course Score. With this option selected, Pearson Connexus shows editable Grading Period weights in the Teacher app Editor.
- Save your Domain settings.
Enabling domain-level Grading periods adds a drop-down menu to the toolbar of the following screens where you can filter by Grading Period:
- Teacher app:
- Student/Observer apps:
Choose current Grading Period for your domain
Once they're created, admins must select the current School year and Grading Period for the domain at the beginning of each new Grading Period, so Pearson Connexus courses can track data accurately.
- Open the more menu in the toolbar of Domain details.
- Select Domain Settings.
- On the School years and grading periods card, open the Current grading period drop-down menu and select the desired period. All of the courses in your domain use this setting as their default, so you want to make sure you make the change at the beginning of each Grading Period and coordinate the change with schools where necessary.
- Select Save.