To modify a student grade, click on Modify Grades. Any grade can be modified, but this should be done with care: once a grade has been modified by hand, then it cannot be "turned off". In particular, a modified grade means the Mallard grades will be ignored; a student cannot retake a quiz in order to improve the score. Only a course director has the ability to modify grades.
View Gradebook by Section
To view a section's gradebook, click on View Mallard Grades. Select
which section's grades and which assignment(s) you wish to view.
Clicking on View Grades will open a page of the gradebook. The left
column is a listing of all students in the selected section, and there is
a column corresponding to each quiz. The display of grades is quite
like an ordinary gradebook, except for the use of color.
Any quizzes completed late have their grades in red. Any grades that were modified by the course director are displayed in green. Each rectangle containing a quiz grade is shaded; the shading corresponds to the number of attempts a student has made on the particular quiz. (Darker corresponds to more attempts.)
From the gradebook, click on a student's login to send email to that student. (This link exists provided the student supplied an email address in User Configuration.) Click on a student's name to go to the list of that student's grades (the same page accessed through the View Grades icon). From there one can go to detailed records.
Cumulative Grade Details
This table details how the student's (best) quiz grade was calculated.
This is particularly useful for a quiz in which partial completion
carry-over credit is allowed (by question or by input). For instance,
suppose a student obtained a score of 90% on a 3-question quiz which allows
partial completion by question. Then the table might
show that Question #1 was completed at 1:36 pm with a score of
100%, Question #2 with a score of 70% at 1:25 pm, and Question #3 with
a score of 100% at 10:10 pm. Clearly these three grades were obtained
with different submissions of the quiz. If the student were to retake
the quiz the next day and score better on Question #2, then the quiz
grade would be raised (provided, of course, that no penalties are
applicable).
Detailed Grade Log
This table provides information pertaining to each
time the student submitted the quiz for grading. The left column
shows the submission number and also indicates whether that
quiz submission resulted from a reloaded quiz or not. (If there is
an "R", then that means the quiz was a NEW QUIZ. If there is no R,
then the student is resubmitting the same quiz for grading.) The
R is important if the grade policy has go_back=no (i.e. if students
cannot improve scores by resubmitting the same quiz multiple times).
The table also shows the time of the grade submission and the "elapsed time" (that is, the total amount of time the student has been working on THAT quiz). An instructor can see exactly which questions or versions of questions were presented to the student with each quiz, and the grade received each time for each question.
input tag.
(Partial credit is determined by the individual
question types).
Mallard only records a grade at the quiz level. Depending on how the grade policy is configured, it can be a letter grade, pass/fail, or a percentage. (If the grade is a percentage, it will be set to 0% if the quiz's adjusted score is below the grade policy's minimum cutoff grades).
Only the quiz grade is seen unless you look at the grade detail.
Apology: There are not yet any "help" pages available for the Mallard Course Gradebook.
Warning: The Mallard Course Gradebook is an exciting new addition to our Mallard instructional system. It has been used very successfully by several courses at the University of Illinois but widespread use will commence during Fall 1998. We have included it with the 98F Mallard release because there has been so much interest, but we consider the Course Gradebook still in beta release.
There is an overview of the Mallard Course Gradebook in the description of Mallard on our public homepage at:
To get started using the gradebook, you will need to create assignment types and assignments. For instance, my assignment types are homework (HWK), laboratory assignments (LAB), and exams (EXAM). (I find it convenient to name the assignment types with short names, so that the individual assignments can be just HWK #1, HWK #2, etc. Shorter names work better for the section gradebook displays.) The weights of these assignment types correspond to their relative weights as used in determining course grades. (I give this information to students at the beginning of the term.) Homeworks are worth 18% of the course grade (I have increased this percentage since using Mallard!) and the lowest score is dropped, labs are worth 7% and the lowest score is dropped, and exams are worth 75%.
After creating the assignment types (more can be added later), I create the assignments. It is a matter of personal preference whether to create them all at the start of the term or whether to add new ones to the gradebook each week. Anyway, I have about 14 homework assignments, each graded out of 50 points, one due each week, and all equally weighted in the final course grade computation. There are 8 lab assignments, each graded on a scale of 0-3 points and of equal importance. There are 3 exams during the term and a final exam. The 3 exams during the term are each graded out of 100 points and are worth the same (15% of the final grade). The final exam is graded out of 200 points and is worth twice as much (30% of the final grade). Hence, the exam weights can be given as 1, 1, 1, and 2 (or, equivalently, as 15, 15, 15, and 30).
When creating an assignment, you can choose to create a single multi-component assignment, or else you can simultaneously create many single-component assignments. Probably the majority of instructors will want to choose single-component assignments: i.e., only the total grade will be entered into the gradebook. That particular grade may be a score for a written assignment or it may be a Mallard quiz score. If, however, you wish a single assignment to consist of several Mallard quizzes or you wish to record exam grades on a problem-by-problem basis (I do this because I like being able to see statistics for individual exam problems), then you need a multi-component assignment. The form for this is somewhat intimidating because it allows you to mix both Mallard and non-Mallard grades within a single assignment! For example, my homework assignment might consist of 2 written questions and 3 Mallard quizzes. The written questions are each graded by hand, with the first worth 10 points (points are assigned to a maximum of 10 and the relative weight of this question is also 10) and the second worth 15 points (weight = points = 15). The Mallard quizzes are always graded out of 100 points (100% being perfect), but I might assign the 3 quizzes to have weights 8, 8, and 9. This corresponds to my assignment being worth up to 50 points, half due to Mallard and half due to written work.