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Help - Fill Grades |
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This screen is used to specify what gradable assignments there are for this class.
Enter or change the "Number of Grades" and click "Fill" to set the number of gradable assignments. The program then creates an entry in the table below for each grade. Enter or update values in this table and click "Update".
| Grade # | A sequence number. You can't change this. |
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| Description | Enter a description of the grade if you like. Enter any text helpful for keeping organized. If the grades for this class are all tests, you might enter "Chapters 3 & 4" or "Final Exam". If the class is a series of book reports, this might be the title of the book. Whatever. |
| Weight | A relative weight for this grade used when computing the class average. See Details below. |
In some classes, gradable assignments are easily thought of as a numbered list. Like, there are ten chapters in the textbook and we are going to have a test for each one, so there are ten tests, #1 through #10. In that case, all you really need to do is enter the number of grades and click Fill. The program generates the list and you're done. There's no real need to enter descriptions.
In other classes, you may want to enter descriptions of grades and relative weights. Even in the simple case of a series of chapter tests, the grade sequence number may be confusing if you are skipping some chapters. That is, suppose you will be studying chapters 1 and 2, skipping 3 and 4, and then doing 5, 6, and 7. This gives 5 tests. But it might be confusing to just let them be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because then test #3 is chapter 5, etc. So you might want to put the chapter numbers in the Description column.
If you increase the number of grades, new blank entries are added to the end of the table. If you decrease the number of grades, entries are deleted from the end.
As grades don't affect each other, there's little problem with adding or deleting grades as the year goes on. So if you don't have your plans finalized when you're setting up your classes at the beginning of the year, or if plans change, it's no big deal.
By default, all grades have the same weight. That is, they all contribute equally to the final average.
You can adjust the weights so that some grades count for more. There are two ways to do this: the Percentage Method and the Relative Method.
Give each grade a percentage weight, that is, the percentage of the final grade that this grade contributes.
For example, suppose you have five unit tests and a final exam. The final exam is half the grade. You could give the final exam a weight of 50 and each of the unit tests a weight of 10. This then totals 100%.
If your weights don't quite total 100%, don't worry about it: the program will adjust. Weights are given to one decimal place, which can cause rounding errors. For example if you have three grades of equal weight, you would assign them each 33.3. This only totals 99.9, but it's the closest you can get. The program will round everything up a little to make up for it.
Give the least important grade a weight of "1", and all other grades some multiple of that. For example, suppose the grades for a class are five chapter tests, a book report, and a project. The report counts for twice as much as a chapter test and the project counts three times as much. Then give each chapter test a weight of "1", the book report a weight of "2", and the project a weight of "3".
Technically, the way SkuleKeepr calculates averages is as follows: Multiply each grade by the weight of that grade. Add them all together, and divide by the total of the weights. Thus, in reality all weights are relative weights. Percentage weights are just the special case where the weights total 100. But it's often easier to think of them as percentages then as relative.