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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022Liked by David Clark

I have spend UNTOLD hours trying to get my LMS's to conform to my grading needs!! I use a Pass/Late/Not passing yet/Missing scale (Specs grading) for a lot of the work I ask for. Generally, setting up a scale, where Pass =10, Late = 9, NPY=5 and Missing = 0, does the job. However, I am struggling with what gets displayed to students... Moodle only shows the % and letter grade.

I just this week had the realization that maybe I need to take it all into my own hands (like the old days of paper grade books and Easy Grade Pro!). Your notes about setting up a spreadsheet are super helpful. Bookmarking this one for future reference. Thank you!

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I have fought to a stalemate with Blackboard and mostly gave up. I sometimes upload my "summary columns" as custom columns (since they are numerical data, Blackboard is happy to display them). But everything that matters happens in a spreadsheet for exactly your reasons.

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A note on marks that we show to students: I've found that my University's LMS allows for unicode symbols as the "grade symbols" students see in the gradebook, which allows one to use symbols that are less of a "code".

😄 : Satisfactory

😔 : Revisable

☹: Try Again

Initial feedback from students is that these are better than the default A/B/C/D/F letter marks. Non-expression symbols like × or ✓ work too. Just gotta explain in the syllabus exactly what the symbols mean.

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Mike, I do this as well! But not all LMSs allow this (Blackboard Ultra, for example) so I've tried to avoid making recommendations.

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Mike: Which LMS does your University use?

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