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- Had difficulty finding the grade breakdown by category after final grades were submitted. Feels this is an issue for checking scores of students with incompletes.
- Would like to see graphs generated for letter grades as well as for detailed grade cutoff. Would use these stats (letter grades w/o + or -) to determine cutoffs prior to final grade submission. Would like this available w/o special prompts/inputs
- Would like more warnings. I.e., he changed the cutoffs after reviewing the final grades, but did not realize that the grades were not recalculated to his new cutoffs prior to submission.
- Would like TA's access limited to proxy for their students (sections) - but needs to be able to grade all students in fully-joined sections. This is especially important when uploading outside grading content (like exams) that is geared for the entire course.
Carol Gee, Mathematics, Visiting Research Asst Prof
May 9, 2005
Carol uses GradeBook as her primary grading tool. She teaches mid to large scale classes - varying in size from about 40 to 300 students for a single section. Since the students are listed in a single section this creates large grading sheets. There is a big lag time for loading grade sheets and many screens are difficult to manage. The grading sheet itself is in a small area of the frameset.
- 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.)