This is a guest post by 2 of our awesome live chat agents: Anna and Rick

Many of our schools – and their teachers – prefer to use weighted grades when calculating final grades for a semester or for a course. If you are considering using weighted grades, or wondering how to get your grading all setup, here’s some info on how it all works.

Weighted Grades

Weighted grading is a grading system where certain types of assignments/assessments are prioritized more than others in the final grade. Often, the idea behind this sort of grading is smaller assignments are designed to be more like practice. Tests and exams are designed to allow students to show what they have learned. Therefore, these big grades ought to count for more in the final grade than practice grades should.

For many classes, weighted grades work in grading systems that rely on using graded assignments for feedback and calculating a student’s final grade. This final grade is a weighted average. This sort of average is designed to make the final grade closest to the average of the type of assignment that is the most heavily weighted.

Here’s an example of how weighted averages might be used. Say you are a History teacher, and you give 3 big tests per term. A dozen quizzes, homework every day, and a daily participation grade. However, you want these three big tests to be the biggest portion of a student’s grade because they require a student to demonstrate their best writing and all of their knowledge to date. You might decide that for the grading system in your class, tests will be 50%, quizzes will be 25%, homework will be 20%, and participation will be 5%.

As a result in this class, tests have by far the largest impact on a student’s final grade. Quizzes have half of that impact, homework has a little less, and participation has even less of an impact.  At the end of term, the way students’ final averages would be calculated following a formula that looks a lot like this :

Final Grade = (sum of tests’ averages) * 0.5 + (sum of quizzes’ averages)*0.25 + (sum of homeworks’ averages) * 0.20 + (sum of participation averages) * 0.05

Looks like a lot of time with a calculator, right? Well, that’s where our Gradebook enters the game.

Setting Up Formulas in Gradebook

A great feature about the Gradebook is that does all of these calculations for you. Teachers enter a student’s grades and set up a quick formula, and the final grade is calculated automatically. The formula appears in the teacher’s gradebook, the report card if its a final grade, and if students and parents are allowed to see gradebooks, in their gradebooks in their student and parent portals.. And, when administrators go to draw up report cards, these final grade calculations automatically load into Report Cards.

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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:Read More »

The QuickSchools Standard Charges module is actually a very powerful tool for applying discounts and charges based on group of students. For example, you may have a discount for siblings, or a discount for veterans, or a discount for employees. Although the Fees Tracking module may not know automatically if a student is deserving of one of these special discounts, once you include a student into a standard charge, the Fee Tracking module remembers this, so you can re-apply the same discount/charge in the future.

Let’s go through an example:

Creating a Standard Charge

First you’ll need to go to the “Fee Tracking” > “Standard Charges” menu and click on “+ Add Standard Charge”:

Give the standard charge a name, like “Discount for Employees”. Then use the “+ Add Item” to add transactions for this standard charge. Remember that each standard charge can have more than one transaction if required. And you can enter a negative amount for discounts:

One you’ve saved the Standard Charge, it’ll appear in your list of standard charges.

Applying a Standard Charge

When you’re ready to apply the charge, click on the “Apply” button. The following pop-up should appear:Read More »