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Buzz allows administrators to set up School years and Grading periods within them at the domain to help align grading practices across the courses within the domain.
- A School year can look different for different schools and districts, but, traditionally in the US, they begin in the fall and end in the spring and represent the curriculum a student gets during one grade-level of schooling. In Buzz, an administrator can define any date range they want to represent a School year.
- A Grading period in Buzz is a range of time within a defined School year for which students can be given an overall grade. Many districts divide their School years into four quarters, and students receive a grade for each of those quarters. In Buzz, each of those quarters would be defined as a Grading period.
As teachers create gradable activities in a course, they can assign them to a specific Grading period, so those grades will be included in that period. This article explains how to manage domain-level Gading Periods.
Note: We recommend administrators create School years and Grading periods for a domain before creating courses, so that the courses use them by default. If, however, you have courses that existed before defining a School year and Grading periods, teachers can map their Grading periods to the new domain settings.
If your domain does not have Grading periods defined, you can create and manage your own:
You will see a dropdown menu in the toolbar of the following screens where you can filter the content shown according to Grading Period:
- Gradebook (Some domains include the option to see a Course Score as well as the Grading Period score; the Course Score is calculated by rolling up all of the Grading Period scores in a course into one overall score.)
- Activities player
- People
- Editor
Select All Periods to include non-gradable activities.
Manage domain-level Grading Periods
To review and manage these settings:
- Open the Editor tool.
- Select Course settings from Tools in the toolbar.
- Review and/or change the selected School year using the dropdown in the course details card. If you choose to leave this dropdown blank, your course cannot be aligned with the domain-level Grading Periods.
- Scroll to the Grading periods card to:
- Indicate whether you want to Use grading periods.
- Set activities and folders to Inherit activity grading period from the top-most folder. This setting overrides any grading period assigned to activities and subfolders with the activity editor, so they inherit the top-most folder's grading period.
- Add and/or delete Grading Periods (review these directions before doing this).
- Map Grading Periods to the domain Grading Periods.
- Save changes.
Add and/or delete Grading Periods?
You are able to add and/or delete additional Grading Periods to your courses if you want. For best results, use only one of the following two approaches:
- Recommended: Align your course Grading Periods one-to-one with the domain-level Grading Periods. This is the recommended approach if available. It should happen by default for all courses created after the domain-level Grading Periods are set, so you should rarely need to add and/or delete periods.
- Disable alignment with the domain-level Grading Periods, and create your own. This may impact the ways scores are rolled up and recorded in the domain, so we recommend talking to system administrators before taking this approach.
Disable alignment with domain-level Grading Periods and create your own
- Open the Editor tool.
- Select Course settings from Tools in the toolbar.
- Open the School year dropdown and select the blank top option.
Map activities/folders to specific domain-level Grading Periods
In order to take advantage of domain-level Grading Periods, you must map activities and folders in your course to them.
Map existing activities to a Grading period
To map existing activities or folders to a Grading period:
- Open the Editor tool.
- Select the edit button next to the activity or folder.
- Open the Settings tab, and:
- For folders, select the desired Grading period in the Period dropdown on the Folder settings card.
- For activities, select the desired Grading period in the Period dropdown on the Gradebook and submission card.
Map new activities to a Grading period
To create new activities or folders and map them to specific a Grading Period:
- Open the Editor tool.
- Choose the desired Grading Period from the dropdown in the the toolbar. If you don't see the dropdown, make sure you have Grading Periods turned on for your course.
- Add the desired activities or folders.