Adjust the Category Weight in the Gradebook

While aggregating the natural value with Natural Aggregation (Natural weighting as a sum of grades) grading is easy, you may want to use weighted categories. Weighted categories allow you to adjust the impact that each category has on the overall grade. This can be helpful if your syllabus specifies what portion of the grade each category will be worth.

For example, if you want to weigh all of the course’s quizzes to be 20% of a student’s grade, all the assignments to 40%, and all of the manually graded items to be 40%, you’ll want to group those grades items into three separate categories respectively, and then adjust the weighting.

Adjust the category weight

  1. On the Gradebook Setup (Grades>Setup>Gradebook setup) page, locate the row that contains the title of the category. 

  2. Click Edit In the Actions column (at right)A category configuration page will pop up.

  3. Under the parent category section, check the Weight adjusted checkbox and enter a custom value.  

    A screenshot of a UCSF CLE gradebook setup page showing how to adjust the weight category 1.png

  4. Click Save changes.
  5. Repeat the process to adjust the weight for other categories. The total weight of all categories is 100.

A screenshot of a UCSF CLE gradebook setup page showing how to adjust the weight category 2.png 

Ungraded items or items with 0 weight

      • You may wish to have a grade item that is ungraded; for example, you want students to submit an item through the CLE, but you will not assign a grade to it. This can be useful for, e.g., low-stake H5P activities, ungraded rough drafts, or other documents that you might want to provide comments for or have a record of, but that will not carry a grade. In this case, the Assignment effectively becomes a dropbox. To do this, create an Assignment as normal, but within the Grade setting section, select None as the Type.
      • Similarly, you may wish to provide a grade for something like a rough draft to show a student what they would have received, but ultimately you don’t want the grade to count towards the overall course grade. To do this, within the Gradebook setup page, simply override the weight of a particular grade item and set it to 0. That way, you can grade an item as normal, provide feedback, etc. but the grade will not count to the final score.
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