Gradebook Profile Categories

Overview

Depending on your grading policy (Total Points vs. Category Weighting), categories can be one of the most important parts of your profile. By default, Genesis provides you with 3 categories, Homework, Quizzes and Tests.

You can add more categories and remove the defaults if you like; they are completely configurable by you.

You also have the ability to break a category into sub categories.

Genesis provides you with as much flexibility as you can imagine.

In this section we will get into the basic concepts of categories and what they control and affect.

Category Screens

This screen provides you with a complete overview of your setup, so there is a large amount of information here.

Next to each category is each of your school's marking periods with subtitles below them labeled "% of MP" and "Dropped".

These are the values for your categories per marking period.

You can edit these fields on this screen by typing in and using the drop downs, be sure to hit the 'Save Categories' button to save your changes.

Once you modify a category, you get a complete listing of every field available for a category. Let's go through the fields and give you some explanations of what they are and how they affect your gradebook.

• Percentage of MP Grade - This column only applies to users who are using category weighting to calculate their MP grades. If you are using Total Points, you can skip over this section and move down to the Dropped column (If you are using Total Points, a question mark icon will appear in this column for each category). However, if you are a teacher who enjoys weighting your categories differently, please read on. For each category, you will see a percentage under each marking period. This is the percentage of the individual category for each marking period. This percentage is completely configurable by you. You will also notice that on the last line of the table, the total percentage for the marking period appears. If this percentage is not 100%, then the percentage will be shown in a bold red font, to let you know that you should reconfigure the percentages. It is very important to make sure that all your percentages add up to 100% for each marking period.
• Number of Grades to Drop - The dropped column is configurable by you to drop the X worst grades in a particular category, for a particular marking period.
• Grade Type - The Grade Type is the default grade type for the category. If you grade Homework with checks, then you can set that as the default. This means that when you are creating assignments, if you select the Homework category, the grade type will automatically be set to checks for you. You can always override that value as well.
• Max Possible Points - This is the same premise as the grade type. The default value here will automatically default the assignment score to this field's value.
• Colors - The colors dictate how your assignments look on the Assignment Spreadsheet screen. For instance if you select a white background with black font, then the assignment heading will reflect those colors that you have chosen.