In your QuickSchools report cards, there is a facility to Lock Report Cards. This is a way to safeguard your report cards from inadvertent changes from teachers, once report cards are finalized. Locking the report cards for the first time also publishes them for parents to view on their Parent Portal (as well as for students in the Student Portal). If changes are required after report cards have been locked, you can also Unlock Report Cards.

It’s important to note though, that when Report Cards are unlocked, the report cards will NOT resynchronize with the final grades in the Gradebooks. So if the Final Grades from the Gradebooks have changed from the last time you locked the report cards, you’ll notice the following when moving your mouse over the marks/grades:

So in this example, the report cards were previously locked when the Gradebook was calculating a Final Grade of “78.4”. However, now that the report cards have been unlocked, the Gradebook is showing an updating Final Grade calculation of “86.8”. If you need to change the marks or grades (or any other field) you can change the values by simply typing over them. This is again a safeguard to make sure all changes to report cards after they have been locked have to be made intentionally and explicitly.

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We’ve posted several articles (tutorials really), about the Standards-Based Gradebook (or SBG for short) that we released in QuickSchools recently. The whole concept of grading students based on standards is relatively new. The goal of this new methodology is to gain more insight into areas that require more attention. We thought we’d put together a brief video tutorial just to put everything together:

Please check out the original blog posts regarding SBG here:

• Introduction: http://blog.quickschools.com/2014/07/08/standards-based-gradebook/
• Tutorial Pt 1: http://blog.quickschools.com/2014/09/03/standards-based-gradebook-tutorial/
• Tutorial Pt 2: http://blog.quickschools.com/2014/09/08/standards-based-gradebook-tutorial-part-2/

Additional videos here:

• Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCpY4M0kIuw
• Standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ktn8jG1LA
• Grading Scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75DxFPyjnU0

As always, do let us know what you think!

Over the years, we’ve worked with many schools who need to build transcripts to be sent to colleges and other institutions. The QuickSchools Transcripts module is very similar to our Report Cards module, in that you can very easily configure existing templates to suit your needs. And if our existing templates don’t quite fit your needs, we can certainly build new templates as well.

Here we discuss some considerations when building / configuring your transcripts on QuickSchools. Let’s start with a few questions:

1. How do you award credit (by quarter, or semester, or year)?

Credit is often times awarded independently of the grades that appear in your report cards. For example, you may have report cards with 4 quarters, but if credits are awarded yearly, the transcripts will only show a single end-of-year grade. And if credit is awarded for every semester, then the transcripts will only show grades for each semester (and not for each quarter). Colleges typically are not interested in how semester or yearly grades are calculated from quarterly grades.

In the example above, credits are awarded every semester. The report cards on the other hand may have 2 semester or 4 quarters per year.

2. How do you calculate grades for each subject (average quarterly final grades)?

In general, semester grades are simply the average of quarter grades, and yearly grades are simply averages of all the academic terms. But if your final grades require the inclusion of specific final exams, then that will need to be factored in. Or if your grade is a running total for the entire year (i.e. a single gradebook for the entire year with no averages), that would need to be factored in as well. Please come chat with us with specific on how to set up your transcripts, if it’s not a simple average.

Based on these first 2 characteristics, you should be able to select a template, before configuring it further:

3. How do you calculate Grade Point Average (GPA)?

Out of the box, QuickSchools follows the standard calculation of Grade Point Averages. Each letter grade is assigned Points (A is 4 points, B is 3 points, and so on), and each subject is assigned a number of credits. Courses are weighted by credits, and then renormalized by total number of credits.

You can change the mapping of Letter Grade to Points via the “Transcripts” > “Transcript Configuration” screen.Read More »