Weighted grade books and transfer students' grades

Question

How does your institution handle weighted gradebooks and students transferring in? I'm at a k-12 school system so we have students transferring in all the time. I'm not sure how to import their transfer grade and keep the grade fair.

thompsli · Answer

Back when we used percentage-based grading, I'd just pick the "middle" percentage that applied for the transfer letter grade and enter it as their grade on all pre-transfer assignments regardless of grade category. So, since we were on a 90%+A, 80%-89.99% B, 70%-79.99% C system, I'd put in a 95% for all past assignments for an A, 85% for a B, and so on. Canvas will auto-calculate the points if you enter it as a percentage in the gradebook, so this was a pretty fast copy and paste job.

This did not work with anything graded complete/incomplete rather than as points, but at the time I did not use enough of those for it to matter.

Now, of course, we're not able to keep gradebooks in Canvas at all because we're using Outcomes to generate letter grades, and Canvas does not do that.

James · Answer

How does it being a weighted vs points-based gradebook affect things?

If the assignment grades are missing, they are not calculated in the grade. This means that your gradebook would contain just the grade that they have received since they came to your class. That is same whether or not the gradebook is weighted.

I taught at a college, where students could not come in mid-semester, but they might transfer between courses. In that case, faculty would decide how similar their assignments were to the assignments in the class a student came from. If they were comparable, they would just enter that grade in the gradebook. In other cases, the courses were so dissimiliar that no transfer of grades could be done and they just started over where they picked up. In another situation, the instructor might take the existing score (say 80%) in the first course and then their grade in the new course (say 50%); they might do some kind of average where 40% of the class had passed before joining, so they got 40% of the 80% and 60% of the 50% for a combined 62%. Usually, faculty didn't put that much work into it.

I'm not sure, but perhaps the closest to what you're asking about is what if the assignments are so dissimilar that they cannot be transferred or that we don't have individual grades, just an overall percentage. You could go through and give the student that particular score on all assignments that they missed. This works regardless of whether it is a points-based or a weighted gradebook.