Introduction

You're packing for an upcoming trip, so you pull out your luggage: your big suitcase, a smaller carry-on, and your backpack. Your clothes, toiletries, and personal items make up 100% of your gear, but will be distributed across a suitcase that can hold 60% of your things, a carry-on that can hold 30% of your things, and your backpack that can hold the remaining 10%. 

You make similar choices when you weight your course grades. Let's pretend this is our course grading system:

  • 60%: Quizzes
  • 30%: Assignments
  • 10%: Participation

Since all your quizzes and assignments are virtual, you need to "tell" AsULearn to pull out some digital luggage so you can pack your grades for the semester-long trip you're about to take. Categories are to grades what luggage is to your things. 

In this course grading system, we'll use  Weighted Mean of Grades to calculate a course total (see Gradebook: Weighted Mean of Grades (Percentages) for more information). 

Creating grade categories in AsULearn 

1. In the settings bar along the top of your course, select the Grades link.
Selecting the grades link.

2. Open the dropdown menu in the top left part of the page, and select Gradebook setup.
Opening gradebook setup.

3. Open the Add dropdown menu in the top right part of the page, and select Add category.

Adding a category from the add drop-down menu.

4. In the panel that opens, enter a Category name, select an Aggregation type, and set the Maximum Grade.

Selecting category name, aggregate type, and maximum grade.

Which aggregation type should I use?

The default aggregation for your category will be Simple Weighted Mean of Grades, which calculates a category total as if it were out of 100 points (even if your category has more than 100 points of activities inside it). Some instructors opt to use Natural instead, which calculates a category total based on the total number of available points in the category. Not sure which to pick? Learn more about each in the following articles:

5. When you're done, click the Save button to create your category.

Advanced Category settings

Though the steps above will work for nearly every category you create, some faculty have found value in the following category settings:

Exclude empty grades

This setting is enabled by default across all AsULearn courses. It simply means that if a student has not earned a grade in your course yet, that grade is not counted until it's entered. Unchecking this option causes two outcomes:

  1. AsULearn follows your instructions and begins calculating every grade a student hasn't earned yet as a 0 in their course total.
  2. Students begin sending you angry and/or panicked emails wondering why they have a 12% in Week 3 of the course.

When faculty change this setting, it's usually at the very end of the semester when empty (missing) grades should be calculated as a 0 in the course total. Bear in mind that if you change this setting, then import (copy) this course into a future section, this setting will also copy over.

Drop the lowest and Keep the highest

This self-explanatory setting allows you to instruct AsULearn to keep or drop a specific number of the highest or lowest grades in the category. For example, some instructors have 11 course quizzes, but only want to count 10 in the course total. Setting "Drop the lowest" to "1" will tell AsULearn to automatically drop the worst quiz grade for each student. 

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