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- One major difficulty for large sections is that the button controls at the top of the page cannot be accessed without a lot of scrolling. Making those buttons non-scrollable might make submissions easier.
- Her grading process includes regular TA's who grade homework manually, graduate TA's who are given cms grading access and herself. She would like to be able to grant limited access to Gradebook to regular TA's by category.
- Ran into difficulties the first time she tried to upload grading sheets as the file had changed from download to TA and back to her. Finally determined that the file must be tab-delimited text file for upload. No instructions found in the Gradebook.
- When she goes to View Grades as a Student it works inconsistently - sometimes she can view the grades and at other times she is told she does not have permission. She has not found any logic to why it works only sometimes.
- She would like to see additional methods for accessing grades. For example, sometimes she needs to change grades for an individual student, but it's very time consuming to go to each category and wait for the full grading sheet to load before she can change the grade.
- She felt the Gradebook system was unclear during her first final grading process. She was unsure if she would be notified and was not sure if she could save grades without submitting them.
- She was also unclear as to whether students can view her cutoff choices.
- Her department recommends downloading as backups. She would like to be able to download grades for all items in all categories as backups and for her personal records. She can currently only download for a category grades or item grades within a category.
- She often needs to download category grades as backups and to continue grading students who are dropped from the course temporarily (due to registration issues.) While she has never experienced problems with grades when students return, her department informed her that this could occur and she should maintain her own records.
- She would like the ability to rearrange categories within Gradebook. It's difficult to add a category once the gradebook is generated, since it defaults to the bottom of the list and cannot be rearranged like Website builder allows.
- Also, Website builder allows her to view what items are visible to students in the visual representation on the left. She would like Gradebook to inform her in this manner as well.
- She noticed when looking at the student's view of the quiz responses that non-completed scores are displayed as -1 (e.g., for homework not done yet.)
- She would like the roster view to generate an actual email address link rather than just the first portion of the email in text only.
Kristi Case, Physics/Geology, Undergraduate Program Coordinator
5/10/05
Kristi contacted faculty in her department prior to my arrival and gathered feedback regarding the grading process. Faculty comments follow this interview.
Observations: Newer faculty tends to use Gradebook as is and are more receptive to using the program. Many faculty do not use their Kerberos login often enough to remember it come grading time. Prior to Fall 04, she was responsible for distributing and collecting grading sheets.
- 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.)