Create separate grading periods, so you can easily divide grades by date range without building additional courses in Buzz.
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.
Enable Grading periods in your course
Grading periods can be set up in two ways:
- Recommended: System admins can set up domain-level grading periods that are associated with a specific school year. When you create a new course in that domain, it will automatically use these settings.
- You can set up course-level grading periods using the directions below. We recommend you only do this if your domain does not have Grading periods set up for you to use. If you are unsure, talk to your system administrator.
- Open the Editor tool.
- Select Course settings from Tools in the toolbar.
- In the Grading Periods card, check the Use Grading Periods box.
- We recommend you 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, making it easier to quickly assign activities to a new Grading period by simply moving it to a new top-most folder.
- From here, you can:
- Give each grading period a name; it may be useful to include date ranges.
- Assign each grading period a grading weight. This number determines the relative impact each period has on the overall grade; if each period should have equal impact, assign the same number to each.
- Add grading periods.
- Remove grading periods by clicking the garbage can (delete) icon next to each.
- Use the up and down arrows to manage the period order.
- Save.
Assign activities to grading periods
Once you've enabled grading periods, use the activity editors to assign activities to them.
- Open the Editor tool, select the desired activity, and click the pencil (edit) icon.
- Check the This activity is gradable box in Settings tab > Gradebook settings card and select the desired period from the Period dropdown.
- Save.
Additional articles
Tips
- Only gradable activities can be assigned to Grading periods.
- Once you've assigned activities to specific Grading periods, you can filter them by period in the Gradebook tool's Grades screen.