Section 12.3. Effective Grade and Scale Practices

12.3. Effective Grade and Scale Practices

Grades and scales are important tools for providing feedback to your students. Using these tools effectively can help you create a more powerful learning environment.

12.3.1. Grade Practices

As we have seen, the grades tool is very simple. There isn't much to worry about when managing the grades area.

The most important thing to remember is to frequently download your gradebook for backup. Your system administrator should be backing up the entire server on a regular basis, but you can never be too certain. After all, your students will complain to you if they lose their grades, not to the system admin.

For regular backups, I recommend creating a folder specifically to hold your grade data files. Once you've created the folder, complete the following procedure once a week during your course:

1. Click on Grades in the administration area.

2. From the Grades table, select Download in Excel Format or Download in Text Format.

3. Save the file to your disk, somewhere other than in your grade storage folder.

4. Once the file has been saved, rename it to include the date of the download.

5. Copy the renamed file into your grades storage folder.

If you follow the backup procedure on a regular basis, you will have a record of student grades if there is a catastrophic loss of data on the server. You can always recover students' grades up to that point in the semester if you have a regular backup.

12.3.2. Scale Practices

Scales give you the ability to provide qualitative, instead of quantitative, feedback, but they require careful wording. When creating scales, ensure your word choices are meaningful to the students and provide information they can use to improve their performance in the future. For example, the good-bad scale I used as an example in the "Creating Scales" section is actually a poor choice. A scale that includes some indication of why the assignment was poorly done would be useful. This is a difficult task because a scale allows evaluation only along a single dimension, as opposed to the multidimensional evaluation possible with the workshop and exercise tools.