Page Comparison

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The purpose of this document is to collect faculty Gradebook stories based on their use and experiences with MyUCDavis Gradebook for identifying desired features and designing tests.

Faculty were contacted and asked specific questions regarding their use of MyUCDavis Gradebook feature

Questions:

1. Are you using Gradebook to submit final grades or do you use the final grading process only?
2. Are you submitting grades for a course with multiple sections or with multiple instructors?
3. Do you enter final grades yourself or does a department MSO or TA enter final grades?
4. Do you find the instructions on the website clear? Are you able to get answers when you need help?
5. Are you able to easily discern whether grades for your courses have already been submitted?
6. Have you experienced any difficulties when submitting final grades?
7. Are there any comments you would like to make regarding the final grading process or Gradebook?

Brian Enderle, Chemistry, Affiliated Faculty/Lab Coordinator

May 5, 2005

• TA's do all the grading for his chemistry courses. As the chemistry lab coordinator (for the 2ABC series), he teaches them how to set up the categories in Gradebook. Most TA's follow his setup - each exam is a separate category although some TA's set up all three exams under one category.
• He uses the MW-developed online labs and he would like to be able to upload the final grades from the online lab program into the total lab score category in MyUCDavis.
• One of the biggest issues is that the head TA needs to join sections to create identical Gradebook setups and to make all TA's proxy to their sections, but joining is not desired for multiple TA's to grade. Also, the stats are meaningless to students when only compared within a section rather than over the course.
  The desired ability would be to join all the Gradebooks but to retain TA's individual access and for students to see stats in relation to the course not their section only.
• Always views final grades through Gradebook. His current process for submitting is:
  • TA's spend 1-2 hours grading their sections
  • Bryan releases the grades but does not submit them until about 5 days later; this decreased the requests for grade changes after submission.
  • Submits final grades section by section. This can be time consuming as he teaches up to 30 sections in a quarter.
• Regarding MyUCD instructions: he trains his TA's but also tells them they can go to the Arbor for help.
• All grade information is not explained. When looking for information about NS status, we could not find the grade key anywhere in gradebook except on the Enter Final Grades screen.

Andreas Toupadakis, Chemistry Professor

May 5, 2005 (by email)

Regarding the Gradebook: Classes with large numbers of multiple sections like all of Chem 2 suffer from a large shortcoming. Each TA needs access to his/her own sections only but it would be great if the head TA and instructor could look at the whole class all together simultaneously.

As it stands for grading exams now, the scores of all 17 sections have to be downloaded to excel individually and then opened individually and concatenated into one long excel spreadsheet manually in order to make any whole-class determination on grades.

Also the students get the impression from viewing their grades thru MyUCDavis that their section averages/stat info apply to the whole class. I am aware that the whole class and all sections can be joined- but then TAs with access to the class start making errors in changing the grades of students not in their own sections.

Liz Klodginski, Mathematics, Visiting Research Asst Prof

May 6, 2005

• Prof. Klodginski uses Gradebook for grading and final grade submission. She teaches single section and multiple section courses. She generally joins the sections in Gradebook for multiple section courses. Mix of herself and her TA for grading.
• Mostly a good grading experience. An exception was uploading grade files and access issue.
  • She uses a grader on some categories and would like to be able to limit grader access to a particular category rather than giving them full Gradebook access.
  • The grader emails the graded spreadsheet to the TA who enters the category grades online. Their first try at this process was difficult because of the required format for uploading. She uses a MS Office Works program on her PC, and even though she downloaded the spreadsheet from Gradebook, she had difficulty uploading back to Gradebook.
    There were no instructions found for explaining the required Excel format for upload. Found out by experimentation what the proper format should be for upload.
• She submits final grades through Gradebook
• She has emailed for help when needed and received a prompt response.
• She uses a primary/alternative weighing option for determining student grades - and would like Gradebook to be more flexible. For determining final grades, she allows student scored to be weighed either with both mid-terms or with only the higher mid-term grade, whichever is higher.
  She currently downloads the grading output to Excel so that she can add a third column that automatically determines which of the two scores is higher.
• Since she's using two grading alternatives, she finds the stats and graphics are unclear. When she sets the cutoffs - not sure which method is being used to generate those stats. She uses the stats primarily so students can see where they are in the standings
• She believes it is important that students are able to see their grades all through the course. She noticed that the student view stats feature displays a lot of information to students except for their overall average (score) for the course. She provides them with the formula for grading in class, but students must calculate that information for themselves.

Dan Nurco, Chemistry, Teaching Assistant

May 9, 2005

Gradebook comments:

• 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.)
• 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.

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