Teacher Support: How student work is graded

This article is for our High School 3rd edition curriculum. If you are using our older high school or other curricula click here.

More than Multiple Choice

With our Foundations in Personal Finance High School 3rd edition we have introduced various types of content items. The chapter post tests include multiple choice questions plus short answer and free response essay questions. Video pages have a fill-in-the-blank Guided Notes sections and free response Analyze and Reflect questions. The digital textbook page has a Journal Question (not all schools have a digital textbook option). And there are a limited number of interactive activities.

Submitting the Grade

With the exception of the pre-test (which is all multiple choice) all of the items in the gradebook require the teacher to manually score or review the auto-scoring and submit the final grade. 

At the top of the Gradebook's main page click on the Content tab. Then you can navigate into the chapter and pull up the item the students have just completed (a chapter post-test, for example). That brings up a list of the students and shows their interaction with that content item. You should easily be able to see which ones need to be graded. There will be a green dot to the left of the name of any student with new submissions. And in the right "Score" column you will see four possibilities.

• There will be the word Grade in bold indicating you need to manually score the item and submit.
• There will be the word Grade not in bold indicating the student has not submitted their work yet (usually no time spent has been recorded for the item).
• There will be a percent score in bold indicating you need to approve and submit or finalize the grade (this appears only when credit for completion is turned on).
• There will be a percent grade not in bold indicating the grade has been submitted or finalized.

To grade an item, click on the word Grade or the bold percent score in the right hand Score column. The grading modal will pop up showing the student's answers on the left and the correct answers on the right. There is a point value and a score box showing the earned points for that question and a Submit Grade button at the bottom of the grading modal.

For multiple choice questions the score is calculated by the system based on the correct answer being chosen. These scores cannot be edited by the teacher. The score box is greyed out.

For fill in the blank answers we use a logic matching feature to read the student's answer and auto-score it for correctness. These will have a green shaded score box if judged to be a correct answer or a red shaded box and a zero score if judged to be incorrect. Teachers can override either of those and manually score those questions by typing a new score in the box.

Short answer and essay questions are not currently auto-scored and must be manually scored by the teacher, unless Credit for Completion is turned on.

Teachers will finalize the grade by clicking the Submit Grade button at the bottom of the grading modal.

Once you have submitted the score for the assessment the percent grade is displayed in the teacher gradebook and in the student gradebook. The points earned are then averaged into the overall grade for that student at both the chapter and class level.