Adding a New Grade Schedule

This help article steps you through adding a new grade schedule. It is followed by a further explanation of the best practice use of grade schedules.

Before creating a new grade schedule first check that none with the same grades already exist. 

CREATING A NEW GRADE SCHEDULE

1. Navigate to the Administration Menu. If you have a wide-screen device this will already be visible on the left-hand side of your screen. If not, click on the Administration Menu icon at the top left-hand side of your screen.

2. Under the heading Site Setup select Assessments 

3. Click GRADE SCHEDULES

4. Click + NEW GRADE SCHEDULE

5. Name the new grade schedule to reflect the grades being used (not the assessment they are being used for) and in the description give an indication of the range of grades, eg. 'Low/Middle/High', 'Yes/No', '1-100 step 1', etc. 

6. Ensure the setting MAKE THIS AVAILABLE SCHOOL-WIDE is selected (red)

 

7. Select the type of grade/options you want available for staff to select from.

NUMERIC: Select the Minimum grade, Maximum grade and step size.

Step sizes determine the aggregation of numeric grades. While they can be smaller than 1 to allow for grades with decimal places. eg. step = size 0.1 (one decimal point), this would greatly increase the number of columns displayed in Insights so is not recommended. A step of greater than 1 would aggregate marks within each range in Insights. That is, if you create a grade schedule with min = 0, max = 100 and step 10, it will aggregate marks in chunks of 10: 0-9.99, 10-19.99, 20-29.99,...100. This makes Insights more manageable for grade schedules with a wide range of possible grades. However, manual entry of grades will be limited to these steps as well. Bulk import through a spreadsheet will not be limited in this way.

SELECT and MULTIPLE SELECT: Add the grades/options you wish to have available by entering text into each field and clicking + ADD OPTION for a new row

ICON SELECT: Add the grade/options you wish to have available by entering text or an image into each field and clicking + ADD OPTION for a new row

8. When all the options/grades are entered, click SAVE GRADE SCHEDULE

 

Further Understanding Grade Schedules

Schools have ended up with 10s of grade schedules, most of which offer the same set of grades and are therefore functionally redundant. This makes finding a correct existing grade schedule difficult, which leads to ever more new, redundant, grade schedules! One Hero school has 196, approximately 170 of which are redundant.

An example of this is seen here:

Each of these have exactly the same three possible grades: Below / At / Above. They are functionally the same so 3 of the 4 are redundant.

What is a Grade Schedule?

A grade schedule is simply a definition of the kinds of grades that may be used by an assessment module. Grade schedules are not in any way defined by the assessment - many assessments may (and should!) use the same grade schedule. There does not need to be a different grade schedule for each assessment module.

Grade schedules can be a simple Yes/No choice; a range of numbers - integers or decimals; word values such as Red/Amber/Green or Low/Middle/High or Below/At/Above; or levels such as 1B through to 7A.

Some examples are 

Stanines (see example above) - an integer range 1-9

Raw scores  - a numerical score, usually an integer from 0 to the possible highest score, which varies for many assessments.

Scale scores - a numerical score, often a decimal from 0.0 to 100.0.

Levels - often descriptive, eg. Below / At / Above; Low / Middle/Medium / High; 1B through to 7A

Any assessment module that uses a stanine can use the same Stanine grade schedule (0-9 with step 1). Any that uses Below / At / Above can use the same grade schedule. Any that uses a scale of 1-100 can use the same grade schedule, etc.

Raw scores can be treated two ways. Either a grade schedule can be created for each assessment's range, eg. 0-25, 0-43, 0-65, 0-100, with more than one module potentially using the same grade schedule, OR, more efficiently, created once as 0-1000 since that would contain all possible numbers (and then some!) and be functionally the same as the more specialised grade schedule. The later approach may be confusing as users can enter grades higher than the specific test maximum.

Schools should therefore create generic grade schedules, eg.:

Name	Description	Range
0-9  /1	Numeric: 0-9	0-9 step 1
0-1000  /1	Numeric: 0-1000	0-1000 step 1
0.0-100.0	Numeric: 0-100 (1 decimal point)	0-100 step 0.1
Below/At/Beyond	Select: Below / At / Beyond	Below / At / Beyond
Yes/No	Select: Yes / No	Yes / No
L/M/H	Select: Low/Middle(or Medium)/High	Low/Middle(or Medium)/High
1B to 7A	Select: 1B to 7A (B,P,A)	1B - 7A

 If schools wish to simplify their grade schedules they can replace a specific grade schedule with a generic one provided that every already entered grade is in the new grade schedule. (So replacing Yes/No with Yes/No/Maybe is OK but not the reverse.)