What do I do when a student transfers? (Part 2)

Although a lot of student transfers are from one of your own class periods to another, some students transfer from one teacher to another. You will have to decide for yourself the best way to deal with this in your gradebook. Several scenarios are described below along with possible solutions:

1. If a student transfers into your class from another teacher less than 3 weeks into a trimester, you may choose to ignore any work he completed before arriving in your classroom. In that case, you don't need to ask for any kind of grade report from the previous teacher and you can mark all assignments given to date in your class as EXC (for excused). Assignments marked that way are ignored in the calculation of a student's overall grade.

2. If the transfer occurs more than three weeks into the trimester and the subject is the same, you should find out how the student performed in his or her previous classroom and attempt to factor that into the grade you will give in your class. There is not a hard and fast rule for this, but here are some options to consider:

• Ask the previous teacher for an All Scores report for this student. At the very least, add a General Comment to your gradebook for the student. It can be something simple like "John transferred into this class on March 12 from Ms. Miller's class, where he was getting a solid B." (Comments can be added under the Students tab.)
• If you want to formally incorporate the student's previous grade in your gradebook, you will have to create some sort of "super" assignment for him that represents his work in the previous class. Suppose at the point of the transfer, students in your class have already received grades for 1200 points worth of assignments. You could define a single assignment called "Transfer credit" worth 1200 points and give the student a score corresponding to the grade from his previous class. (Be sure to excuse all the other students from this assignment!)
  
• If you want to take into account the student's previous grade in an informal way, you can use the Override Grades feature at the end of the grading period.

3. If the transfer occurs near the end of the trimester, discuss the grading responsibility with the Assistant for Administration in your building.

Remember, these are just suggestions. Use your best judgment and develop your own way to accommodate student transfers.

What do I do when a student transfers? (Part 1)

Student transfers -- from one of your class periods to another, to another teacher, or out of the school -- get handled through the weekly updates from SASI. Your initial reaction might be that the student has just disappeared from your gradebook, often leading to panic on your part!

Remain calm. Students who transfer out don't really disappear from your gradebook, they just get moved to an Inactive students list where all of their grades will still be accessible to you. Because it has no way of knowing if the assignments in one class are identical to those in another, MyGradebook won't automatically transfer assignments and scores for students; you have to re-enter their grades. That can seem like a big pain if you have given a lot of assignments, but there's a fairly straightforward way to make the transfer:

1. Go to Reports and select the All Scores report. Select the class that the student used to be in and change the display to Show inactive students. Make sure Category is set to All Categories.
2. Print the All Scores report for the student to use as reference.
3. Go to the Scores tab. Change to the class the student attends now. In the gray area under the tabs, select By Student. Make sure it is set to Show active students.
4. Select the student who transferred. You will get a column of assignments into which you can copy the scores you have on the printout. If there are assignments that were different between the two classes, you can either modify the score or mark the student EXC (for excused). Don't forget to Save.

When a student transfers from one of your classes to another teacher, the process is a little different. Chances are you have had different assignments and your scores won't correspond to those in the student's new class. In this case, the best approach is probably to give the new teacher a copy of the All Scores report for the student (step 1 above). The new teacher can decide how to incorporate your grades into their class and what kind of credit to give the student.

How you can deal with a student who transfers in from another teacher will be the subject of another blog post.

No failing grades

It is the district grading policy not to give students a grade of F; instead, we give Us. (The only exception is a class like Health or Organized Study that is graded P/F.) If you see any grades of F appearing in your gradebook, it means that your grading scale is not set correctly.

You have a default grading scale in your My Account area, but each class also has a grading scale associated with it (found under the Class tab) and if there are differences, the class grading scale takes precedence. When you check your grading scale, you need to carefully check the entries for the lowest grade in the table. The number corresponding to the letter grade should be the lowest percent that is acceptable for that grade. Any percentage lower than the lowest entry in your table is automatically assigned an F, so you want the lowest entry to be something like 0.1 = U.

Without this change, you will have to manually override every F in your gradebook. Believe me, changing your grading scale is much easier!

If you need to assign grades like P and F, it is possible to set a special grading scale for that purpose. Look for a separate blog entry explaining that procedure.

Progress report cautions -- set the grading period

The grade that will be sent from MyGradebook to progress reports (or to SASI for report cards) is the overall grade for the current trimester. In order for you to be absolutely certain of the grade you are sending, make sure that you set the Period drop-down to the current grading period. MyGradebook also calculates an overall grade across all grading periods, and that can give a very different view. All of your grade overrides should be on the grades for the current grading period or they will have no effect.

During first trimester, if your gradebook is set up correctly, grades for the current trimester will be the same as the grades for All grading periods. If you see a discrepancy, it suggests that you have scores assignments in your gradebook with due dates outside the current trimester. Check the due dates for your assignments carefully and correct as necessary.

Worth of repetition: You must set Period to the current grading period before you override grades.

Progress report cautions -- check your class lists!

Now that progress reports are behind us, it is worth discussing some of the issues that arose. This is the first of several short notes.

We're not kidding when we ask you to check your MyGradebook class lists several days in advance of when progress reports are due to be generated. Class lists in MyGradebook are pulled directly from SASI, so if the wrong students are in your gradebook or they are showing up in the wrong places, it means the office thinks they are in the wrong place, too. We need to get those mistakes corrected. Don't forget that you should always be looking at the list of Active students when checking your class lists. The All students list will include students who may never have shown up in your classroom or who transferred out partway through. Those students will also appear on the Inactive students list.

What if I forget my password?

It happens to all of us once in a while. You go on vacation and when you get back, all of a sudden you can't remember something that was at the tip of your fingers before you left. Luckily, if you forget your gradebook password, there's an easy way to get it back.

1. Go to www.mygradebook.com
2. Click Log into Your Gradebook in the Teachers section.
3. On the login page, click the Forgot your password? Click here link.
4. Type in the email address associated with your MyGradebook account. Make sure you are using the correct form of your district email address. For some of you, that is username@op97.k12.i.us
5. Wait a few minutes and then check your email for a message from the MyGradebook administrator. (It can sometimes take up to 10 minutes for the message to be received. If you are using WebAccess, don't forget to click the Update button. Sometimes it helps if you log out and back into email.)

The email will tell you the password associated with the account. Once you know what it is, go back to MyGradebook and log in. Make sure you click the Login button instead of following the Click here link again! If you want to change your password after you've logged in, go to the My Account section.

Handling missing assignments

MyGradebook uses the ? character to indicate assignments that are not yet graded. When you have entered an assignment in the gradebook but have not yet assigned scores for any students, the entire column will be filled with question marks.

But what happens when some students have turned in the work and others haven't? You should understand how MyGradebook works to decide how to handle these cases in your gradebook, especially if you are printing reports to share with parents or students.

If you want to be able to tell that the assignment is missing, but aren't yet ready to count it against the student in calculating his grade, keep the question mark in place. Keep in mind, however, that most reports in MGB will not show this as a missing assignment, but rather as "due and unscored." On the Missing Scores report, you do have the option to have the question marked assignments included in the list of missing assignments, even though they do not affect the student's overall grade.

Suppose, however, that you want to clearly show the student and/or parent the effect of that missing assignment. In that case, you might want to assign a score of MIS. It gets counted as a zero in the calculation of the grade, clearly showing what will happen if the assignment never reaches your hands, and it also clearly flags it as missing. Only scores of MIS get counted as "due and missing." By default, these are the only assignments that get listed on the MIssing Scores report. A score of MIS implies that the student could still get points were he to get his act together and turn in the missing work.

Entering a grade of zero for a missing assignment has the same effect on the overall grade as a score of MIS, but doesn't highlight it as missing for the program. You should consider reserving the zero grade for an assignment that is not only missing but for which the last possible deadline has passed for turning it in. (Of course, an assignment score is never carved in stone. Even if you have given a score of zero to a missing assignment, you can always change it when the student finally comes through.) Grades of zero will never appear on a missing assignment list in MyGradebook.