The grade category feature enables you to organize assignments, calculate subtotals, and exclude the lowest score within a category. You can create nested categories, meaning a category can be a part of another category. However, each grade item can only belong to a single category.
Once you have added grade items to the gradebook on your course home page, you can further organize them by creating grade categories. This helps in managing the grades of all participants in the CLE.
- While in the Gradebook Setup, click Add category at the top of the page.
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Give your Category a name (i.e., Quizzes, Term Paper, Assignments, Forums). For this example, we will keep the aggregation as Natural but this does not necessarily have to match the category for the entire gradebook. Learn more about Natural aggregation.
- If you drop the lowest x number of grades for this category, click Show more. Add the number of grades you will not count in the box for Drop the Lowest. This will default to 0.
Note that on additional Category menu options: The Category total will be utilized when altering the aggregation method from Natural. However, if you choose to maintain the Natural aggregation, the Category total will simply reflect the total point value of all graded items within that category. On the other hand, the Parent Category will only come into play when creating sub-subcategories.
After you have set up your categories in the gradebook, the next step is to organize the existing items into these categories. For any new graded items, you can easily add them directly from the item's settings page, and we will explain that process shortly.
- To move items into the categories, you'll find a column on the far right labeled Select.
- To do this, simply check the box next to the item's name that you wish to move into a specific category.
- Scroll to the bottom of the graded items list and select your category for the drop-down menu Move selected items to.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save changes.
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The grade book will automatically recalculate the subtotals for categories based on the aggregation method selected, and the course total based on the default (Natural) aggregation method.
- Click Continue to go back to the gradebook setup page.
If you kept importing a CLE course from a previous course, you may find that the gradebook defaults to the older aggregation method, Simple weighted mean of grades instead of Natural. We highly recommend you export the gradebook as a backup and change the aggregation method to Natural.
- In the Grade category drop-down menu, choose the category you want to add that item to.
- When finished editing the activity, click Save at the bottom of the screen.