Grade Book Assignment Weights

John McKeon

Hello!

I have recently set up my Blackbaud grade book, and I had a question about assignment weights. I understand that you have the option to weight certain assignment groups in the final grade calculation, but is there an easier way to weight particular assignments. For example, if I graded an assignment out of 15 points, but wanted it to be worth only 10 points in my grade book (standard value for my classwork assignments), is there an easy way to do this without having to calculate the grade (out of 10) on my own? I noticed the “factor” option, but from what I can tell, this only allows you to make an assignment count as more (ex: double/triple) than its initial point value. I feel like I am missing something here. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ryan Farrington

@John McKeon Interested to see what others advise… but my gut says that in this case, you could make the factor .66 or .67 which will ROUGHLY get you to the 10 points. I hate doing this though because it requires a math genius to double-check / explain a student's grade to them if there's ever a question in the end.

John McKeon

@Ryan Farrington
Thanks! This does seem to work, although it's a bit more complex than I would like it to be. For example, I am currently trying to make an assignment that I graded out of 14 points worth 10 points. To do this, I would need to make my factor 0.7142, which looks crazy!

Geoffrey Goodfellow

@John McKeon, what is it that you are trying to achieve by making the assignment only 10 points instead of 15? Another option is switch your gradebook calculations to use category weightings instead of just points. This would permit you to put 15-point assignments into two different categories. This enables you to weight one category higher than the other so that both assignments can be entered as a 15-point assignment, but the contribution of the one you are wanting to be 10 points would contribute less to the cumulative grade.