Using Enrollment Types Instead of Grade Plans for Pass/Fail Grading

Jennifer Welch

We currently have separate grade plans defined to account for any class that is graded pass/fail vs those that use standard grading. I just read about Enrollment Types and was hoping that next school year we can do away with the grade plans that use pass/fail and use an Enrollment Type of Pass/Fail or Independent Study for those classes that need it. Does anyone have an experience/thoughts on this idea?

Brian Gray

Like you, we have separate grade plans for letter grades and pass/fail courses.  We will continue to use the separate grade plan for the courses that are pass/fail for all students by policy.  Our letter grade plan and our pass/fail plan have different combinations of grades to report. For example, the letter grade plan at the end of the fall term reports a marking period grade, an exam grade, and a term grade.  Our pass/fail plan has only the term grade.  (Pass/fail classes by policy do not have term or year exams.)


Some schools (but not us) have a policy that allows a student to take some elective classes that are usually on a "letter grade" grade plan as a pass/fail course, even while other students receive a letter grade.  If we had such a policy, we would use the pass/fail enrollment option for a student that chooses it.


In a related matter, I discovered that using the Audit enrollment messes with our Honor Roll definitions a bit.

• Our Honor Roll rules require a GPA >= a cut-off number AND no grades below a specific grade.
• We have a few seniors who work with our Health teachers as Teaching Assistants with the 9th grade Health classes. We enrolled the TAs in the Health class with an Audit enrollment so that they have access to course material and discussion submissions.
• Because the TA is enrolled in the course, it appears on the grade card.  We added "Audit" and "T/A" as grades to the grade translation (identified as Audit grades in the far right column of the translation) so that the grade card would not have an empty space, and so that there is an obvious explanation for why a senior is in a 9th grade class. The Audit and T/A grades initially did not have min/max values or a numeric equivalent.

All grades that do not have a numeric range or numeric equivalent are "lower" than the lowest grade that does have a numeric range.  The result was that students who were TAs in the Health class were excluded from honor rolls because the T/A grade is "lower" than our cut-off.  I had to edit the grade translation to give the T/A and Audit grades a numeric range that is much much higher than the highest real grade.


I have not tested the behavior of Honor Roll rules with the Pass/Fail enrollment option, so I don't know how it will behave there. Based on what I saw with the audit enrollment, it may cause a problem for some schools.

Scott Chrysler

Brian -


We run a Supplemental Instruction program here in which juniors and seniors who excelled in a lower level course may become Supplemental Instructors (tutors). The SI's needed read-only access to the bulletin boards and topics of the courses they helping with. I tumbled a bunch of different ways to do this, but eventual settled on creating a new Role, Supplemental Instructor. I modified the the Dorm Group Manager to include only the following Tasks:


Topic Admin

Core School Forms

School Forms


I also went the extra step to set up an SI role for each course so all of the SI's did not have access to all of the courses that have an SI. Through Core > Security > Group Page Access, I added permission for the SI-<Course Name> to be able to access Bulletin Boards, Topics, and Assignments only for the specific course.The SI's are not able to run the reports associated with the role because they do not have access to other areas of the database. I need to give credit where credit is due - Haven on the Support Team came up with this solution. It took a bit to set up but has worked like a charm.


Hope that helps.


Scott




 

Brian Gray

Scott - 


Thanks for the idea. I'll do some experimenting with that approach to see if it fits better with what we want to accomplish.


bkg