Assessments pre-configuration

The assessment tool (also called the gradebook tool by some of our users) requires several settings to be correctly configured to give you a useful result. The activities weighting, a minimum certification score (pass-mark), skills rankings and a certificate template are elements that can extend this tool if properly configured. If these are not set correctly, an orange alert will be displayed on the main Assessments page.

Illustration: An empty gradebook generates information messages

So let’s analyze each of these elements in more detail.

Total weight and minimum certification score

To view and edit this basic configuration , click on any of the edit icons ( ) of the page:

Illustration: Assessments – General settings

The Total weight of the course is important for assigning individual weights to activities. This will allow you to “spread” the importance of each activity in your course. If you only have a few activities, maybe a total weight of 10 is enough, but we consider 100 to be a common selection among teachers.

The Minimum certification score defines the pass-mark for the course. It is expressed as a percentage of the total score. This can be useful in several ways, but in the end, if a student has a grade/score that is superior to that percentage, he/she will “pass” the course and, if you configured certificates, he/she will also receive a certificate. If the score is below that percentage, no certificate will be generated, and we will consider the student didn’t acquire the corresponding skill or skills.

The description is really not used much. You can use this field to describe what is expected of the student to get a certificate or a passing score.

Finally, an option allows you to define whether you want to generate a certificate or not. In previous versions, the generation of a certificate was automatic if the student reached the minimum certification score. However, some teachers noted that they didn’t always have the time to configure certificates properly, and that they wanted to remain in control of when certificates should be generated when they used the assessments tool with students. Fair enough: we added the option so the certificate generation is optional (and is not enabled by default). We’ll come back to that option a bit later.