Grading Categories allow you to apply different grade settings to groups of activities within the same course. Simply create the Grading Categories in Course Settings and place activities in the desired category when you create them.
Create Grading Categories
- Open the Editor tool.
- Select Course settings from Tools in the toolbar.
- From the Grading categories card, you can:
- Check the Use weighted categories box to enable an editable numeric weight field next to each grading category listed (not available for courses using Multi-Outcome Scoring).
- Add grading category.
- Open the Category details box for existing categories to:
- Change the category Name.
- Change the category Weight (if using weighted categories).
- Choose whether you want to drop any number of the lowest scores in the category.
- Check the Display score for students as box(es) to indicate they way(s) you want student performance displayed for the category: Points, Percent (%), Letter grade, and/or Minutes spent.
- Check the All activities are extra credit box for the category.
- NOTE: You can weight categories marked as Extra Credit. This weight only impacts the way additional points earned from these activities are calculated, and does not impact the other weighted categories.
- Save your changes.
Now, when you create or edit activities, you can assign them to one of the Grading categories you've created.
Assign Grading categories in bulk
Buzz allows you to make various types of changes to multiple activities at once using the Editor > Activity list > Bulk edit tool.
Learn more: How do I make changes to multiple activities at once (Bulk Edit)?
Weighted categories
The category weight value defines how much impact the activity grades in that category have on the final grade relative to the other categories in the same course. Activity scores within a category contribute to the category score, which is factored by the category weight when computing the overall course score.
Example
Assume you create two categories:
- Quizzes with a 750 grade weight and 2 quizzes worth 10 points each.
- Homework with a 250 grade weight and 3 activities worth 10 points each.
Because of the grade weights, even though all of the activities are worth 10 points each, the quizzes contribute more to the course grade:
- Quizzes are worth 75% of the course grade (750 / (750+250)).
- Homework is worth 25% of the course grade (250 / (750+250)).
If a student were to get perfect scores on the quizzes, and zeros on all the homework activities:
- With weighted categories, the student's final score is computed as (20/20 * .75) + (0/30 * .25) = 0.75.
- Without weighted categories, the student's final score would be computed as (20/50) = 0.40.
The ability to easily assign different weights to categories allows you to more precisely assess student performance on the most critical competencies and personalize your attention based on that performance.