Tips and Tricks: Identifying Students With Specific Grades

Derek Nichols

We can all use a few tips and tricks every now and again! These blogs are intended to highlight a specific question from our users and attempt to provide an answer, or at least some insight, into how to solve it. Today, we’re talking Grades.For all educators, grades are incredibly important, especially keeping track of how certain students are doing at any given time especially those who may be struggling a bit more than others.

One question we see often is how to find ways to display students with certain grades, especially finding a quick way to see who may be potentially failing. Thankfully, the Education management product has a couple different ways to handle this. Let’s explore.

Gradebook Grades List
The first, and the one that most might be familiar with is the Gradebook Grades list. This list option can be found under Academics, then Grades, and finally Gradebook grades list. Opening it displays a default list of students, but using the columns and filters available, you can really customize the list to display whatever you want.

For the sake of this blog post, we’re interested only in who is failing. So, open the Filters, then under Grades, you can select a value such as Equal to, Less than, or any other property to specify the grade you're looking for. In this case, you could set the filter to Less than 60, then select Apply filters to show which students have a great of 59 or lower.

Naturally, there are a ton of filters you can play with in this case, especially if you’re looking for a specific Student Grade Level, School year, or others. For more on this feature, check out our documentation here.

Grade Analysis
Alternatively, the Academics section of Blackbaud's Education management products offers a Grade Analysis tool you can utilize as well. For those who may not know, you can find this feature under Academics, Grade calculation, and then Grade analysis. Essentially, this method allows grading managers to find students whose grades meet criteria that you set.

Once here, you can fill out your reporting parameters though for this, you’ll want to stay with Grade Comparison, and then Academics for the Group Type. Next, select your Term, Grade, and Conditions, plus any sorting methods you may want. To help find failing students, you may want to set the conditions to something less then or equal to a lower grade to filter out all of the passing grade students.

When you have the parameters as you want them, select Generate Report which display all matching students below.


That's all for this week. If you have questions you think would be a good fit for these Tips and Tricks blogs, let me know in the comments! Next week is (shockingly) March, so you know what that means: Time for a February recap! We'll see you then.

Vicky Lopuchowycz

Thank you for doing this type of post! Sometimes you know one way of doing things but then get to learn an alternative that can be really helpful and you can pass along to others at your school.