Calculate and report final course grades

It’s time to report your students’ final grades to the university’s STORM system. If you store and maintain your students’ grades in Sakai’s Gradebook, you might consider exporting your final official grades from Sakai to upload into STORM. Before doing so, you should understand how the Gradebook tool in Sakai works. The following things you might need to know:

“0” vs. “blank”

(Should I leave a grade entry blank or assign a “0” value?)

Items that have not been graded (for instance, tests not taken, missed homework) are NOT automatically considered in the calculation of a final grade. These ungraded entries would be as “blank” instead of a value of zero (“0”). This could result in a higher course grade for a student; thus, in this case you should assign a “0” value. However, if you allow excused absences due to illness or extenuating circumstances,  you should leave it as “blank.” So, depending on your grading policy and special circumstances, you need to choose  “0” vs “blank.”

Categories and Weighting

In the Gradebook tool, you can create categories and assign Gradebook items to them. Also, you can assign percentages to the categories, thereby weighting them and the items they contain. Note: When you assign Gradebook items to a category, keep in mind that items that are worth more points are already “weighted” more heavily. If you want all items to influence the grade equally, you must make them worth the same point value or use percentage grades.

Extra credit

If you allow for extra credit, add a Gradebook item worth 0.01%. (the lowest number the system will accept). You can then award students the number of points they earned across the semester. If you plan to include extra credit in your grade calculation, you have to be very careful NOT to give zero points to students who did not opt-in for the extra credit. If you do, Sakai might compute that zero as a grade and actually penalize a student.

Release Course Grades

By default, course grades are not visible to students. You need to instruct Sakai via Course Grade Schema to release them when you are confident that grades are correct.

Verify that the grade conversion scale is the one you wish to use, and check the checkbox for “Display course grade to students now”. See the screenshot below:

Export Official Grades

Sakai provides an integrated tool that creates an export file to upload into the university’s STORM system. This guide covers the instructions on how to.

Before creating an export file, it is recommended that you review this documentation about preparing course grades. It reviews course grade settings and how to determine if all grades have been recorded correctly.