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- Priority request: she would like to be able to sort by processed so that she could easily determine which faculty have not submitted grades yet.
- In their Walker Annex facility, the 7A instructors determine grades by course. Multiple sections (A AND B) are assigned to a single faculty member. The changes from Fall to Winter were an improvement, but still do not allow global uploading of grades. Faculty uses their own internal grading system and then uploads their grades into FGS using Excel.
- Many instructors experience difficulty loading Excel files. There are multiple machine types, PC, Mac and Linux, and the process is difficult. The format errors that appear are unclear. The upload process would not accept a CSV file. She/they are unable to understand the error messages - they followed instructions but are often forced to resave their files. Often resolved by trial and error, but are unclear as to what they did that finally allows the upload to proceed.
- When entering grades manually, there is a slow response on the bubble sheet, i.e., she enters a grade then has to wait before she can enter another bubble. May be a slow computer issue, but it's still frustrating.
- She finds the email confirmation helpful. Her process is to print out the fgs sheet, then to check off sections/names are she received the confirmations. The ability to sort would be a big improvement. Combining all sections for an instructor by course would be another big improvement for her department.
- There are research course taught offsite around the world. She often enters these grades herself after receiving an email from the instructor indicating the grade. Often these are single student courses with a 'U' or 'S' grade.
- One of the reasons that faculty keep separate grading sheet is that they want to keep student grades even if the student drops the course.
- Faculty would be happy if they could upload the entire course grade sheet, even if the program accepted only A section grades. Usingthis method, they may need to do it 2-3 times (A,B,C), but at least they could use their existing forms.
- Some instructors have TA's who enter grades in Gradebook for them.
- She provides hands on assistance to faculty primarily for grading uploads.
- Faculty downloads and uploads rosters from both MyUCDavis and the Registrar's office. They experience problems in these processes and would like to see improved acceptance and performance in these areas.
- The online grading process reduced her workload and she has less physical work than the old scantron process (distribution, copying, checking, filing.)
- Starting Fall 2004, she topped keeping grade copies (i.e., scantron copies) but she is still keeping other types of forms and petitions for the department records.
- The greatest improvement to date has been the removal of the non-graded courses from the list she sees.
- Her department did experience problems in Winter 2005 with notifications for their courses coming in with the instructor listed as Ushida who was not in their department. She contacted IT Express from the number on the flyer and the received confirmation in a timely manner that the grades were submitted by the correct instructor. She was happy with the resolution of this issue.
Ariane Mc Kiernan, Physics, via email to Kristi Case:
Dear Kristi,
I have two comments about the electronic grade submission:
1) Bubbling in the grades took forever; I remember waiting almost a minute after clicking on one grade, then I was able to click on the next student's grade. Again, that took another minute before I was able to go on. I don't know if this was because of some server problem occuring at that particular time (5am on a Friday). Needless to say, I decided to submit the grades another way since this method was taking too much time. (see #2 below).
2) It would be more convenient to be able to submit the grades for the entire class and not separately by lecture section (A or B). There are cases where a student is registered for both lecture sections (by mistake), but even then it's easier to download the entire class and compare what the registrar student list is to our database of students. Often the registrar has a student registered in another lecture section and then here we are with our sorted list of students for a particular lecture section and we don't show them there. What difference does it make which lecture section they are in? If we get a list from the registrar that identifies a student in a particular lecture section, and compare to our list (with lecture section visible) then there shouldn't be a mix-up with grades going to a student in lec A when they were registered in B. In that case, we would give the student in lec A a "No work submitted" , and the same student registered in lec B, the actual grade. I hope I'm making some sense on this one. If it's not clear then I can explain it to you over the phone.
Those are the only comments I have (they have already fixed the biggest problem from last year: having to download a separate list for each DL section---which was 22 downloads back then!).
Thanks,
Ariane Mc Kiernan
Physics 7A Lecturer
John F. Gunion, Physics, via email to Kristi Case
I decided not to use MyUCDavis because of several things lacking.
1) the ability to choose flexible weighting for different grades and to choose alternative grading schemes (such as dropping one midterm and reweighting other things), keeping only the one most favorable for each student.
2) lack of proper graphics capability for plotting distributions of grades on each exam and of final scores and the like.
I know of several others who find these problems a big issue.
JG