Grading question

Sarah Herrick

Hi. We are in the process of migrating from our current SIS to Blackbaud. Currently, all of our core courses (English, math, etc.) receive a letter grade and credit value and contribute to a student's GPA; however, in the first term of a student's 9th grade year, these letter grades are converted to Pass/No Pass. We don't want to lose the history of these letter grades, but we also don't want to display them on the transcript or begin the cumulative GPA calculation (until the second term). We cannot set up a separate grade plan because our courses (except English) are not specific to a grade level (e.g. Freshman math, Freshman biology, etc.). We're trying to figure out how to accommodate this in Blackbaud and I'd love to know if anyone else does something similar. (Or, if not, if you have any novel ideas!) Thanks, in advance.

Scott Chrysler

@Sarah Herrick
To determine possible work arounds, I would first need to know what grades appear on your transcript? If just one final grade for a course appears on the transcript, the work around can be accomplished fairly easily, in theory. If you list a grade for each semester on the transcript, it will be a more convoluted process.

Scott

Sarah Herrick

@Scott Chrysler Well, we haven't designed the transcript yet, but we are on trimesters: three terms (fall, winter, spring) and our courses last only for one term. So, any given student will have five courses with grades in the fall term, five courses with grades in the winter term, and five courses with grades in the spring term. However, for 9th-graders, the course grades in the fall should display on the transcript as Pass/No Pass; beginning in the winter, the course grades should display as letter grades and the cumulative GPA calculation should begin there, as well.

Adrian Skrentny

@Sarah Herrick
We do something similar with 9th grade English students. All of our grading is setup as a letter grade for grade with a numeric range and they display as letters on the transcript. We instruct our 9th grade English teachers to give the students a P (pass) when they enter grades on the grading tab when those grades are due. We still have their numerical grade accessible within the gradebook for those classes and the P (pass) grade is not included in the GPA calculation in our grade translation table.

Jeff Gaudet

@Sarah Herrick Here is a screenshot of how our grading is set up. You will see that a score of 65 is given a “P” for passing. You can give it any numeric value, just make sure that it is not included in the GPA.

Scott Chrysler

@Sarah Herrick - So long as you want the P/NP to appear on the transcript, the way we handle this is having “work around” numbers on our translation table. Our school translates on output which means our teachers' numerical grades are translated to the appropriate letter grade when being printed on the report card/transcript. We needed the ability to note WP or WF on transcripts. So I added the following lines to the translation table: 0.001 = WP; 0.002 = WF.

When teacher calculate the grade, they just need to substitute the “work around” number for the actual grade. The translation table sees the work around and enter the desired letter grade. So you could add to your translation table 0.001 = P and 0.002 = NP.

Hope that makes sense. If not, let me know.

Scott