Assignments Being Dropped from Cumulative Grade

@Geoffrey Goodfellow I have seen this happen when teachers import assignments from another course in between semesters. If the import is done between semesters, the 2nd step of the assignment import has a marking period dropdown, and it defaults to “none”. (It defaults to the current semester if it is during the semester) I have seen if it is set to none, the assignment is imported into the gradebook but the add to cumulative grade box is unchecked. Not sure if that is just the way we have our school setup - we have an interesting setup to say the least - but that is what I have seen.

@Geoffrey Goodfellow - Some of our teachers have reported this happening. There is some sequence that results in that box getting unchecked, but I haven't been able to recreate it. One of these days I will (maybe) figure out what steps are involved to cause the problem.

In my troubleshooting guide for grades that “just don't look right” I tell teachers: In the Gradebook, click the Reports menu and select Grades - By Student. The right-most column indicates if the grade was excluded from calculations. The report also shows other assignment parameters (max points, extra credit, factor, etc) that can mess with grade calculations if set incorrectly. It's easy to see the parameters for all of the assignments at once instead of opening the assignments one at a time.

@Geoffrey Goodfellow I've been noticing this as well.

Every year I get a handful of teachers who realize somehow the “Publish grade” and “Add to cumulative grade” boxes get unchecked on an assignment. I've always chalked this up to user error. I know that sometimes teachers will want to add an assignment for students to see but if they haven't yet decided how many points an assignment will be worth, they have to temporarily uncheck “Add to gradebook” in order for the assignment to save. Later, they go back and re-check “Add to gradebook” but forget to also check “Publish grade” and “Add to cumulative grade” since they're so used to these automatically being applied.

A related scenario is when importing assignments which has already been mentioned here. If teachers don't choose a Marking period in step 2 of the “Import assignments wizard”, the assignments will not be added to the gradebook. Before the school year starts, teachers will go in and import ALL of their assignments. When they get to step 2, the marking period defaults to the current marking period which for us is summer school. Since they can't choose multiple marking periods they leave the dropdown on “None” which means all of the assignments are imported with the “Add to gradebook” option unchecked. Then, when they have to go into each individual assignment to add the grading info (YIKES), those extra boxes get missed. I had tickets open about this process last fall because the import filters were excluding some assignments AND the knowledgebase article on the topic had incorrect information.

This being said, the number of teacher complaints I've heard about this has definitely grown this year so either we have a lot more teachers making these mistakes or there is some sort of issue causing these options to uncheck. I haven't been able to nail it down either.