Creating Weighted Categories and Items

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Creating a Category

  1. From the Manage Grades area, select Category from the New menu.
  2. Type a Name for the category.
  3. If you want, type a Short Name to display in the grade book.
  4. If you want, type a Description of the category.
  5. Select the Allow users to view description check box if you want to make the category description available to users.
  6. Enter the total Weight or percentage that you want the category to contribute towards the final grade.
  7. Select either Distribute weight evenly across all items (if the items are of equal value) or Distribute weights by points across all items in the category (if the items in the category are worth different amounts) .
  8. If you have chosen to Distribute weight evenly across all times, and you wish to drop some items (i.e. not have some highest or lowest items included in the calculation of the students’ grades), type in the number of items to drop.
  9. Select or clear Display class average to users and Display grade distribution to users according to your preference
  10. Click Save and Close.
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Adding Items to a Category – Weighted System

Once you have a weighted category set up, you can add items to the category. You can either assign new items to a category as you create them, or assign existing items to a category by editing the item’s properties and selecting the appropriate category from the Category dropdown.

Note: When you add items to a weighted category, the weight of the item within the category will be determined by the weighting settings for the Category, regardless of the Max. Points or Weight settings for the individual item. For example, let’s say you have created a weighted category worth 12% and chosen to distribute the weight evenly across the category. If there are three items in that category, each item will contribute 33% towards that weight. If you add a fourth item to the category, the weighting will be adjusted so that each item contributes 25% of the category’s weight.

You can also use the Bulk Edit feature to assign several existing items to a category:

  1. Click Manage Grades to display the grades list.
  2. Select the items you wish to group under one category and click on the bulk edit icon.
  1. Under Category, select the category to add the items to. The weighting for all items in that category will be automatically updated. Alternately, if you have selected manual weighting for your items, you can change those values now.
  1. Click Save.
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