Introduction

The Natural aggregation method is one of the most commonly used methods for grading in AsULearn. It determines a student's course or category total (grade) by calculating how many points the students actually earned versus how many points they could have earned. For example, if there are 1,000 points of activities in your course, and a student earns 900 points, their grade will be 90%. 

This article explains how Natural calculates a course or category total. A tutorial for how to change your gradebook's aggregation type to Natural is embedded at the end of this article. 

Using the Natural grading method


Use Natural if all of the following are true:

  • You aren't using percentages in your course (e.g. Quizzes are worth 40% of the course total, Attendance is worth 10% of the course total, etc).
  • You want the course total to always equal the total number of points a student could have earned (e.g. students can earn up to 1,000 points in your course). 

Grades calculated with the Natural aggregation have the following characteristics:

Weights are determined by each activity's point value. 

A quiz worth 100 points has twice the weight of a quiz worth 50 points. 

A student’s course or category total is the number of earned points versus the total number of available points in entered grades.

If a student completes two quizzes that are worth 100 points each, and earn 90 points on each quiz, they've earned 180 of 200 available points. 

In this example, the course total equals the total number of available points (200), and is calculated automatically by AsULearn as grades are entered.

Unlike other aggregation methods, the course total cannot be changed when using Natural since it is automatically calculated. 

Point of confusion

Natural automatically calculates the course total based on the number of points a student could have earned when a new grade is entered. This means:

  • The course total won't equal the total number of points available in your course until all grades are entered.
  • Multiple students can have different course totals during the semester if they have not received the same number of grades.

Please refer to the examples below for additional context.

Example 1

A course with 10 grades worth 100 points each will have a course total of 1,000 points once all grades have been entered.

Example 2a

A course with 5 grades worth 100 points each has a course total of 500 points once all grades have been entered. If only two grades are entered, each student’s current total is their earned points in those two grades out of the 200 points they could have earned.

Example 2b

Building on Example 2a, if one student has two grades entered, but another student only has one grade entered, their course totals will be different in the gradebook.

NameGrade 1Grade 2Course Total
First Student90/10090/100

180/200

Second Student90/100-90/100

Changing how your grades are calculated

Gradebook: Changing Grade Aggregation Types

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 the gradebook setup.

3. Within Gradebook setup, click the first ••• icon at the top of the Actions column, then select Edit category. 
Selecting category by clicking on the three-dot icon and then clicking edit category.

4. Open the Aggregation menu and select your preferred aggregation.
Selecting your preferred aggregation.

5. Click the Save button at the bottom of the popover window.

Exclude Empty Grades

"Empty Grades" are grades that have not been entered in the gradebook yet. A grade may be empty because a student has not completed a course assessment yet, or because the instructor hasn't graded submitted work. 

Empty grades display as dashes in the gradebook, and are different than scores of zero. Zeros are calculated in the course total, but empty grades (dashes) do not count towards the course total by default.

By leaving Exclude Empty Grades enabled, you are directing AsULearn to display a course total that only includes the graded items in the course, while ignoring grades that have not yet been entered.

Exclude Empty Grades option


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