Standards Based Gradebook and Report Card Building in Blackbaud

Jo Lynn Burke · June 28

We are new to Blackbaud and building out the teacher's gradebook to standards based grading. Would anyone who is currently building their report card and gradebook for standards based grading be willing to share what theirs looks like and HOW they built it on the backend?

Geoffrey Goodfellow · July 3

Hi, @Jo Lynn Burke! I won't pretend to be an expert in Standards Based Gradebooks or Report Cards, but the following is an example of one of our report cards if it helps: Report Card Example.pdf. We sort of use a hybrid between letter grades and standard based grades in the example I showed you. For our older grades, we use letter grades only. For our younger grades, we use standard based grades only.

It's a bit difficult to describe the setup process for our report cards via email/post, but I can gladly share my screen via a virtual meeting if seeing what I have setup helps your cause. I will start by saying that I have very few teachers using the Standards Based Gradebook. Most just enter the final SBG onto the report card at the end of the marking period. For those teachers that do use the SBG gradebook, the grades don't tally/calculate to produce a final SBG report grade, so they are also entering a final SBG onto the report card at the end of the marking period. I'm not even sure if it is possible currently for an SBG gradebook grade to calculate into an SBG report card grade. (If it is, I would love someone to show me more about that!)

Geoffrey Goodfellow · July 4

Report Card Example.pdf

Kristi Romanik · July 7

@Geoffrey Goodfellow This is exactly how my lower school report card looks and they use assessment grading.

Leslie Hagen · July 7

@Geoffrey Goodfellow

Thanks for the example report card! I was wondering if you could share how you got T1, T2, T3 to appear only once per page. I can't seem to figure out how to make that happen in the report card setup for our school. For us, the grade plan label (T1, T2, etc) is repeating at the top of every course.

Geoffrey Goodfellow · July 7

@Kristi Romanik, do you know if the SBG grades in the gradebook tally/calculation to produce the SBG report card. (This is currently the way it works for non-SBG grades…teacher maintains gradebooks with a cumulative grade of various assignments, tests, exams, etc. and at the end of the term, they can use the calculate button to extract that gradebook grade and translate it into a letter grade for the report card.)

Geoffrey Goodfellow · July 7

@Leslie Hagen, I don't know for sure, but I think it is only when you force your Grade Plan Grades to have the identical label that it will consider them all as one and not repeat them. We named all of our grade plans across all classes as “T1”. Here is my screen if it helps: Doc1.pdf

Jo Lynn Burke · July 10

@Geoffrey Goodfellow Thank you for your response! I was really afraid that this would be the case! I have been able to set up the grade card in the format I need, which is similar to yours, but the gradebook seems to be the trickier part, and honestly, it doesn't appear that very many schools if any other than yourself, are utilizing much of the SIS side of Blackbaud. Our school is new to it, and the tuition and enrollment side of things seems to be the only part that is working correctly. Sure, we can take attendance and store other types of student information, but my concerns as a principal are regarding the gradebook and reporting features. Sigh! Do you know of any other schools who have been using these features well for awhile?

Geoffrey Goodfellow · July 10

@Jo Lynn Burke, our teachers/principals and parents/student actually find the gradebook to be working rather well currently, but it has taken some time to get everything setup correctly. It permits a teacher to create an assignment column in their gradebook and then assign multiple standards to that assignment that are each graded on SBG scale. These can either be class-specific standards or can also be school-wide standards. Teachers/Advisors/Students/Parents can see a cumulative running total on the student's progress on each standard, and that data is drawn from all the assignments in multiple gradebooks that have been using that standard. The SIS side of things has been working well for us in keeping track of attendance, conduct, test scores, report card/transcript grades, allergies/medical, and contact information. Their favorite functionality at our high school level is to be able to see their schedule for day/week/month that shows which classes they have when in our various period rotations. So much clearer than we had to circulate things via email.

Kelly Colley · August 26

@Geoffrey Goodfellow We would like to create a report card that looks similar to yours. Is this created using the competency based grading? Did you create this or did Blackbaud assist? Would you or someone on your team be willing to answer a few more of our questions?

Geoffrey Goodfellow · August 27

Hi, Kelly. Our report cards were created using assessment skills. (Competency based grading is for the grading throughout the term, but the assessment skills are what get assessed at on the report card at the end of the term.)

We created the report cards ourselves without Blackbaud assistance. I can certainly help any other questions you may have.

Morgan Kunze · September 11

@Geoffrey Goodfellow this thread is so helpful! I may end up reaching out to you for some setup help, your report card is beautifully clear to read. I came to the discussion boards today looking for a specific answer about assessment skills report cards, and I wonder if you can help: Is there a way to amalgamate transferable skills on the report card such that they only show ONCE, rather than per class? Feels like it should be possible since that's the whole point of transferable skills, but I don't see a way to display skills unlinked to a specific class/group. Full disclosure I'm pretty new to the report-card-design game.

*Edited to add: I see that you're showing a cumulative total for each standard online. I'll do some exploring but if I can't figure it out, I'd love to hear more about this.

Geoffrey Goodfellow · September 13

Hi, @Morgan Kunze. The skills in the gradebook are separate from the skills on the report card, so it is possible to assess transferable skills across many gradebooks but then have that inform a single skill grade on the report card. You are correct that all skills need to be associated to a specific course. We have a generic homeroom course that we use for attendance and as the main page for class announcement, etc. That is the course we choose to associate with the more transferable skills rather than listing them in a repeated fashion for each individual course subject.

In setting up the report card marking columns, it is indeed possible to have teachers enter a grade for various columns but then to have a cumulative column that gets "calculated" using data from the other columns. This is setup in Academics > Grades > Grading Setup > School Year Setup.

Hope that helps!

Alexander Cohen · October 3

What a fantastic thread. Thank you, Geoffrey, for sharing your experience with this. We're switching to a hybrid report card using CBE for our 8s and 9s this years, while 10s-12s will record percentages. I built out the new CBE gradebooks, and a report card that I hope will work in hybrid system, but cannot test it until a grade plan starts.

Can anyone tell me, because I've been getting mixed information: When teachers who have CBE gradebooks go to enter grades for report cards, can grades (in our case skills) be automatically calculated and entered based on the gradebook averages for the specific content area skill?

Or do they have to be manually entered by the teacher while referencing Mastery Overview or the student's individual gradebook?

Geoffrey Goodfellow · October 4

Hi, @Alexander Cohen. No, I'm not aware that you can automatically calculate anything on the report card based on the skills from a gradebook. Typically, Blackbaud often presents it as the the skills grades in the gradebook "inform" the final course grade on the report card, but it doesn't auto calculate like how the standard gradebook does where you can have a cumulative grade of 97% in the gradebook "translate" to an A on the report card.

As for testing out your grade plan, I would highly suggest enrolling a test student (or select a student that is a staff member's kid or something) and impersonate the teacher and open the grade plan dates over a weekend and temporarily award final report card grades and skills for that student so that you can generate a real report card and see how things are looking. It also gives you a good idea of the process that teachers will experience at the end of the term. That really helped me fix problems long before the busy end of term came. Once you are done testing, you can delete all those test skills/grades and sleep well at night waiting for the end of the academic term to arrive. 😁

Standards Based Gradebook and Report Card Building in Blackbaud

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