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.
After you define School years and the associated Grading periods for your domain, any course created within that domain includes those Grading periods by default. As teachers create gradable activities in the course, they can assign them to a specific Grading period, so those grades will be included in that period.
Note: We recommend you create School years and Grading periods for your 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.
Additional articles for teachers:
- How do I manage Grading Periods?
- How do I create multiple grading periods within one course? (For use where Grading periods are not defined at the domain)
Create a School year and Grading periods for your domain
- Open the more menu in the toolbar of Domain Details.
- Select Domain Settings.
- Click Add on the School years and Grading periods card.
- Define your School year by providing:
- A Title for the school year.
- If you're defining a school year starting in 2021 and ending in 2022, you might use 2021-2022.
- Start Date and End Date for the school year.
- A Title for the school year.
- Create and define your Grading periods. Click Add to create new Grading periods and provide:
- A Title
- Start Date
- End Date
- Click Done.
- Check the Enable weighted periods and final course score if you want to be able to roll up the grades from all of your Grading periods into one final Course score. Doing this allows teachers to weight some Grading periods more than others.
- When this box is unchecked, students and teachers can see individual Grading Period scores, but never seen them combined as a Course Score.
- When this box is checked, students and teachers have access to both the Grading Period scores and a Course Score. With this option selected, Buzz shows editable Grading Period weights in the Teacher app Editor.
- Save your Domain settings.
Enabling domain-level Grading periods adds a dropdown menu to the toolbar of the following screens where you can filter by Grading Period:
- Teacher app:
- Student/Observer apps:
Choose current Grading Period for your domain
Once they're created, admins must select the current School year and Grading Period for the domain at the beginning of each new Grading Period, so Buzz courses can track data accurately.
- Open the more menu in the toolbar of Domain details.
- Select Domain Settings.
- On the School years and grading periods card, open the Current grading period dropdown and select the desired period. All of the courses in your domain use this setting as their default, so you want to make sure you make the change at the beginning of each Grading Period and coordinate the change with schools where necessary.
- Save.