Grades: How Does HER Calculate a Student's Grades?

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Summary



HomeSchool Easy Records (HER) works on a points system. You don't need to use points for a student while using HomeSchool Easy Records, but if you want to keep grades, the points system makes it easy for you. It's totally up to you regarding the number of points you think an assignment should be worth. This way, you can give different "weights" to different assignments by the number of points-possible you assign to each. For example a test that is worth 50 points-possible has five times the weight as a daily assignment that you give 10 points-possible to. So the test would affect the cumulative grade five times as much as the daily work assignment would in this example.


Not every assignment needs to have points -- you can have many assignments with no points-possible and no points-earned if you want, and the cumulative grade will work out fine.

Note1: When using the point system, avoid thinking in terms of percentages. For example, don't make everything worth 100 points-possible (so that percentages are easier for you to calculate). Doing so gives everything the same weight (100) which is probably not what you want. HER will take care of the percentage calculations for you, no matter what number of points-possible you choose for each assignment.

Note 2: Don't confuse the number of questions on an assignment with the points-possible for that assignment. They may be the same, and often they are the same. But if you want, say, "quizzes" to be weighted always as 40 points each, you need to make a conversion to 40 points-possible (unless there just happen to be 40 questions on the quiz). Example: today's quiz is supposed to be worth 40 points - but it only has 10 questions. The student gets 9 out of 10 questions correct. In your lesson screen you would enter the quiz assignment and enter 40 points-possible and (9/10)x40 = 36 points earned.

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Each lesson allows you to make two entries -- "points-possible" and "points earned". The grade for each lesson is then figured for you as a percentage by dividing the points earned by the points possible and then multiplying by 100. So, for example, if your student earns 18 out of a possible 20 points on a quiz, the percentage grade would be (18/20)x100 which is 90.0%. This would translate to a letter grade according to the grading scale that you have chosen.


If the student then takes a test (that you've decided is worth 80 points) and earns 76 points, the score would be (76/80)x100 = 96.0%. So for the quiz AND the test, a total of 18+76=94 points have been earned out of a total possible 100 points. This makes the cumulative percentage score of 94.0%.

Notice that the test was worth four times as many points as the quiz so it counts more toward the cumulative grade. This is how you can give different "weights" to different kinds of assignments. If you were to just average the percentage grades, you would get the wrong cumulative result (93%) since the two assignments aren't equally weighted.


As mentioned above, this system allows you to "weigh" assignments according to the number of points-possible you assign to each . Just enter assignments and points as they come along and HomeSchool Easy Records will always keep correct track of the student's cumulative grades.

However, if you need to have a plan where the final grade is x% daily work, y% quizzes, z% exams (or whatever), HomeSchool Easy Records won't do this for you. You would need to pre-plan all of your assignments and points ahead of time so that it works out properly. (See "Pre-Planning" below).


Letter grades show up automatically on the Progress Report, the Report Card and Transcript by translating the cumulative percentage grades to letter grades. The grading scale you have chosen is applied in this translation.

Be careful if you pre-enter points possible but forget to enter points earned! If this happens on assignments prior to "today", the current progress grades will be low. It is important to enter all points earned (if you have entered points-possible) once the date has passed for an assignment. However, future assignments with points-possible entries and zero points-earned entries (which is normal) won't hurt the correct calculation of cumulative grades.


Pre-Planning

Say you need to have the final grade for a subject based on x% for daily work, y% for quizzes, and z% for exams. HomeSchool Easy Records has no built-in feature for doing this for you but it is still possible to do with some work. In this case, you need to know what the TOTAL number of points-possible will be for ALL assignments (daily, quiz, exam) for the whole course. In other words, you need to pre-plan your points. Then whatever the TOTAL number of points-possible works out to be, total daily work points-possible for the year will have to be x% of that, quizzes will have to be y% and exams z%.


One way to work this out would be to write down how many daily assignments you will have, how many quizzes you will have, and how many exams you will have. Start by giving the daily work so many points per assignment. Then tally up the TOTAL number of points that ALL daily assignments will have for the year (for that subject). Now if your daily work is to be worth x% of the final grade, divide the total points you came up with (for daily work) by x%. For example, if x is 30% (0.30) and you came up with 400 total points for daily work, divide 400 by 0.30 (you would get 1333). This gives you the total of ALL points for the course for the year. Now you can use this total to come up with how many points to give to quizzes. Say quizzes are to be 20% of the final grade. Then the total number of points that ALL quizzes for the year should add up to would be 20% of 1333, or 267 points. Exams would have to be worth the remaining percentage (50%) so they would have to total out at 50% of 1333 or 667 points (numbers here are rounded). So if you have 10 quizzes, each would be worth 267/10=26.7 points (round it up to 27 points). If you have four exams, each would be worth 667/4=167 points each.