End of the Quarter Grading Reminders

As we hit the crunch time of the quarter, you might find yourself hitting a snag in ANGEL’s gradebook. Please – if you have trouble, email me right away. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to solve ANGEL gradebook problems when you are in a hurry (trust me – I know!)

I can see into all of your classrooms and if you tell me which class and which assignment is the problem, I can probably answer most of your questions in a few minutes. The folks at Presidium are not terribly good at trouble shooting, so you might find frustration there as well.

So – email me right away with questions. Don’t feel like you are bothering me – helping you is my job. I’ll be checking email evenings and weekends through the end of the quarter.

As a help, here are a few grade related ANGEL tips from past months.

ANGEL Tip of the day # 20 – Grades Not Showing Up
As we near the end of summer quarter and prime grading time, I thought I would focus on the top complaints that I get about the gradebook in ANGEL.
Problem: I entered the grades but they are not appearing in the gradebook.

Issue: No gradebook connection or Manual Grading

Solution: Connect the Assignment or Choose a different kind of grading

99% of the time, if someone cannot see their grades they either neglected to connect the assignment to the gradebook or they made the connection and chose manual grading. Let’s look at both of these.

Connecting the Assignment: In order for grades to appear in the gradebook, you need to connect the assignment to the gradebook. You do this under the Settings for the assignment and the Assignment tab. If it says “None” under “gradebook” then that is your problem. Choose New Assignment from the dropdown menu to begin making the connection.

Manual Grading: One of the choices in setting the assignment is Calculation Type. If you choose “manual” your grades entered at the assignment will not appear in the gradebook. You almost never want to choose manual grading as your calculation type. Just choose something else and your grades will magically appear.

ANGEL Tip of the Week #21: My students can't see my comments
We continue with our theme of common gradebook related complaints.

Problem: My students can’t see my gradebook comments.

Issue: Students probably are not running a grade report.

Most of the time when students say they can’t see your comments, it is because they are just looking at the grades nugget on the home page. Alternately, they look at the assignment itself and see your grade, but don’t click on the link to see the comments.

The best solution is to remind students periodically on how to run a grade report. An instructional video is posted in the Cascadia Learning Object Repository (LOR) which you can easily copy into your course (see ATOD # 10 for details on how to do that).


ANGEL Tip of the Day #22 – Don’t delete categories
Continuing with our grading theme, you may be tempted to try and re-order your gradebook by deleting categories. If you have not reassigned the assignments to a new category and you delete the category that they are in, you could lose all of your grades.

To avoid this, just don’t delete categories after you have started entering grades in your gradebook. You can add some, but don’t delete them.

ANGEL Tip of the Day #30 – Reset an Exam
If you are using Assessments in ANGEL for your quizzes and exams, you may find yourself needing to reset one for a student. It is very easy to do.

At the exam under the Lessons tab, click on the “Utilities” link. Then click on “View, Grade or Delete Submission”. Find the student and delete the submission. That will reset the exam.