How are course grades calculated?

How are course grades calculated?

To understand how grades are calculated in Schoolrunner, it’s important to be familiar with the interaction between three tiers of grading: assessment grading, course grading, and yearly grading.

Assessment Grading

Assessments are the first layer in the grading hierarchy. Assessment scores are based on the number of points earned out of the total possible. Each assessment result is scored as a percentage, which is then translated into a traditional letter grade or a mastery level, depending on your grading scale. Raw assessment scores can be modified by:

• curves (set by you; applicable to all students who took the assessment)
• score overrides (set by you; applicable to individual students)
• IEPs (set by an administrator for individual students, applicable to all courses)
• minimum score setting (set by an administrator in the Schoolrunner settings; applicable to all students)

These are the factors that can change a student’s raw score. The result – their gradebook score – counts as the score used in grade calculations. For unmodified scores, the raw score on an assessment is the same as the gradebook score.

Course Grading

Every course in Schoolrunner has a grading methodology: a structure that determines which types of assessments count toward the course grade, and how much they’re worth. This applies to each term of the course.

An English course might make essays and exams more valuable than exit tickets; a math course might put more emphasis on homework and classwork. However you choose to distribute weight across assessments in your course, the total value must equal 100%.

You can also put different types of assessments into a "Bucket", and give that bucket a weight. For example: exit tickets, attendance, and participation can all be combined into a bucket called "Effort". Quizzes, midterms, and finals can be combined into another bucket called "Examinations".

Here’s an example of course grading methodology utilizing buckets "Minor" & "Major":

In the example above, if the teacher records an assessment as "Quiz" (from the "Assessment Type" dropdown on the Add Assessment page), that quiz will not count towards the course grade because "Quiz" is not part of any bucket.

Remember that only assessments that fall within one of your course methodology buckets will count toward a course grade!

Yearly/Term-Length Grading

Just as your course grading methodology determines how much value to assign to certain types of assessments, so the yearly or term-length grading methodology determines how much value or weight to give to each term.

You may want to make all your terms equal or you may want to make the later terms worth more than the earlier ones. It’s also possible to include specific assessments into the yearly grading methodology, such as a midterm or an end-of-year final. If you have a course that lasts only one semester, you can include any quarters that fit into its date range when calculating its final grade.

However you distribute the weight of your terms and assessments, all components must add up to 100%.

In Summary

Three types of calculations interact with each other in order to produce a final grade for each course. This final grade is based upon the weighting of terms throughout the year (or semester), along with any final assessments.

Each term is calculated according to assessment buckets within the course methodology. Any assessment that fits into one of the buckets will count toward the course grade, and any assessment that doesn’t fall into a bucket will not.

Assessments themselves are calculated as a percentage based on the correct number of student responses.