Weighting

Grading weights allow making some assignment categories count more than others in the calculation of grades.  You can also assign weights to terms in a year, so that the terms do not necessarily have to count equally in computing the final grade for that year.

Assignment Category Weights

Because each course has different teaching and learning requirements, HomeSchool Minder allows you to defineassignment category weights independently for each course.  These weights will apply to all students who take that course.  Note that these settings are do not depend on the year or terms in which the course is taught.

For example, if you specify that homework will count for 40% of the grade in Algebra 8, this setting will apply to all students who take Algebra 8 this year, next year, or any year.  Of course, the category weights for Algebra 8 have no effect on Algebra 7, or on any other subject.

Assignment categories in HomeSchool Minder are all weighted equally for each course by default.  This is because the  choice of weights depends very much on the course and on your individual teaching style. For this reason, we highly recommend that you define your own weights for each course as soon as you create it.

Editing Category Weights

You do not need to add category weights, as HomeSchool Minder creates them for you automatically and sets them all to be equal by default.  If you are satisfied with all the categories counting exactly the same toward the grade, then you do not need to do anything.

In the more likely event that you want to change a weight, simply select the course from the drop-down menu in the Assignment Categories header, and then click on the row for the category that you want to change.  Enter the desired weight (in this case, 40), and click Save to finalize your change.

Note that in this example, the category weights have been edited to add up to 100, so that it is easy to see that quizzes count for 25%, homework 35%, and tests 40%.  While this may be the most intuitive scheme in many cases, it is often more convenient to let the weights add up to some other number.  For example, say that you have three categories, and by default they all have a weight of 100 for a course.  If what you really want is 25%, 25%, and 50%, you could edit all three weights and make them 25, 25, and 50.  However, you would get exactly the same result with less work by changing a single value, namely by leaving the first two weights at 100, and setting the remaining one to 200.

Even though the weights in this example add up to morethan 100, HomeSchool Minder will correctly count each of the first two categories as 25%, and the remaining category would count as 50% of the total grade.  The actual weight values really don't matter; only the proportion of each value to the total sum.

Disabling Categories

 

When you do not plan to make assignments within a certain category for a course, you can disable that category by setting its weight to zero.

For instance, it might be that, for a Physical Education course, quizzes don't make sense.  In that case, edit the category and enter 0.

After that, quizzes will not appear in the term summaries view in the Gradebook module.

They will also not be listed in the assignment categories shown in the ReportCard in the Reports module.

Term Weights

For most courses, you will probably choose to make the grade for each termcontribute equally to the final grade for the year.  This is the default settingin HomeSchool Minder, and so normally you do not need to change these weights.

However, to enable you to adapt more easily to unusual circumstances, such as a course with a particularly steep initial learning curve, HomeSchool Minder lets you make the work for one part of the year count more toward the final grade than the others.

Editing Term Weights

 

For example, say that in the 2012-2013 academic year you decide to make the Fall term of Beginning Greek count for 40% of the final grade, while the Spring term counts for 60%.  To make these changes, first select Beginning Greek from the drop-down menu in the Assignment Categories header, then select the year 2012-2013 from the drop-down menu in the Terms header.  Then set the weights for that year as appropriate.

As we've seen from the example above, term weights are defined for each course and apply only to a specific year.  If you teach the same course in the following year, you can either enter unequal weights again for that year, or just take the defaults and continue with equal weighting.  Continuing with the example above, suppose that while your oldest student was taking Greek for the first time one year, his younger sister became familiarized to some extent with the material simply from being around her brother as he completed his lessons and assignments.  In that case, you might decide that the unequal term weighting was not necessary and leave the weights at their default value for the next year.

In the example below, after defining the weights to be 40 and 60 for 2012-2013, selecting a different year (for example, 2013-2014), should show that the weights for that year have not been affected.