“Calculating and Communicating Grades to Students 
and the Registrar“

 Panel: Mike O’Hara, Darrell Butler, and Dave Marini

 Tuesday, November 2 1999, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Conference Room #2 in the Alumni Center  

If a faculty member has a few graduate students in an on-campus class, the need for computers to record, calculate, and assist in communicating grades to students is not great.  But as the number of students increases, as the percent of students regularly on campus decreases, or as the system for calculating grades increases in complexity (e.g., using z-scores instead of points), computers can be advantageous.  Furthermore, if data is already on computers (e.g., Scantron or computer-based testing), why not electronically move it into the "grade book" instead of printing and re-entering it?  It is with these issues in mind, that several panel members described the advantages and disadvantages of three approaches to a computer-based grade book.

Mike O'Hara began with a demonstration and discussion of Web Grade Book.  Web Grade Book provides a one-stop, online grade access point for students using a browser.  From a faculty perspective, it is very flexible in the ways grades are assigned.  It allows easy importing of scores from Scantron sheets and Inqsit (online testing program).  A new feature allows faculty to submit grades to the registrar electronically at the end of the semester!  There have been some problems with student access during finals week several recent semesters and there are some difficulties with complex contingencies in the grading scheme, but the UCS staff continues to work on these problems and are confident that with each version these problems will be reduced.  

Dave Marini demonstrated and discussed Blackboard's CourseInfo.  CourseInfo is an integrated package for providing a course web site, communication tools, a testing environment, and grading tools.  The grading tools provide information in different formats, but the spreadsheet view is probably the most common one for faculty to use.  The grading tools made it extremely easy to create various groupings of students for different projects.  Statistics of emails, hits to web sites, etc can be easily included.  Grades are available to students through a browser, but each class is completely independent (unlike Web Grade Book).  Also there is not a simple way to import information from Inqsit or Scantron sheets.

Darrell Butler discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using Microsoft Office.  He uses the MS Excel spreadsheet to organize information, MS Access database software to merge any downloaded information (e.g., from Inqsit), and MS Word to email all of the students by mail-merging with the information in the spreadsheet.   Spreadsheet grades can be easily saved in a format that can be imported into Web Grade Book so that grades can be submitted to the registrar at the end of the semester.  The main advantages of this approach were flexibility in what is recorded and how it affects grades, local control (so it is always available), and ease of adapting from any previous course.  Disadvantages include price of software, the learning curve, and difficulty in obtaining a student list with email addresses.  At present, this information is taken from Web Grade Book at the beginning of the semester.  

The help desk at UCS provide support for all of these approaches to calculating and communicating grades to students and the registrar and campus workshops on learning these tools are available through CTT and UCS. 

  author and copyright : Darrell L. Butler, last update 12/14/99
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