Most of our schools create new Gradebooks for each academic term. However, if you’re looking to use a single gradebook for the whole year, here are some recommendations on how you’d do it on QuickSchools:

1 – Academic Terms

In QuickSchools, you automatically get a new gradebook whenever you activate a new academic term. So if you’re going to use the same gradebook year-round, you’ll need to make sure that you only have ONE academic term linked any academic year. You’d probably want to name the academic term the same as the academic year, to minimize confusion. Here’s an example (under “New Semester Setup” > “View All Semesters”):

2 – GradeBook Categories

Even though you’re using the same gradebook year-round, you’ll probably want to still separate Gradebook entries by academic term. So we recommend controlling this via the Gradebook Categories (under “Grading Setup”). So for example, if you typically have 3 categories for “Assignment”, “Homework” and “Test”, you would now create separate versions of the 3 categories like “T1 Assignment”, “T2 Assignment”, “T1 Homework”, “T2 Homework”, and so on. You’ll see how this is relevant as we show you how the Gradebook will work with these categories:

3 – Using the Gradebook in Term 1

During the course of the first term, you’d use the Gradebook per the usual. You would also exclusively use the Gradebook Categories designated for the first term. Your Final Grade calculation would then utilize columns and categories for the first term:

The first term report cards would be generated based on the final grades calculated in the Gradebook. These report cards will also need to be LOCKED before Term 2 final grades are calculated in the Gradebook.

4 – Using the Gradebook in Term 2

Once the first term report cards have been locked with the final grades from the first term gradebook, you would then remove the final grade calculation from the Gradebook. You would then create a second final grade calculation for the second term using the columns and categories from both term 1 and term 2 as appropriate:

Again, the second term report cards would be generated based on the final grades calculated in the Gradebook. Remember that the first term grades were already locked from the previous marking period, and should remain as-is.

5 – Calculating a Semester Grade

If you need to display a semester grade in the report cards, you will need to create a separate marking period for it. However, before creating this session, you’ll need to make sure that the second term report cards have been locked with the final second term grades from the Gradebook. From there, just like in the beginning of Term 2, you will need to remove the final grade calculation from the second term final grade, and create a new calculation for the semester.

If you do want a semester grade to appear in the report cards, you will most likely need a custom report card template that grabs the semester grade from the gradebook. Typical report card templates will calculate the semester final grade by averaging the final grades from the previous terms.

This process can get a little messy the more terms you have. Again, please feel free to reach out to our support staff with questions or even recommendations. We look forward to hearing from you.