End of Term Gradebook Tasks

It is important to verify all grades are correct in Cougar Courses (Canvas) before manually submitting official grades in MyCSUSM (PeopleSoft).

1. Check Assignments Index Page.
2. Check Grades.
3. Submit Official Grades in MyCSUSM.

Check Assignment Index Page

The Assignment Index Page contains all graded activities in your course, including graded quizzes and surveys, graded discussions, and assignments. These activities are organized using Assignment Groups, which act as gradebook categories. The order of the Assignment Groups and activities determines the order in Grades for you and your students. Unpublished activities are not counted in grades (and are not visible to students).

The best way to ensure everything is set up correctly is to compare your Assignment Index Page with your syllabus:

1. Add any Assignment Groups (example: Exams, Discussions, In-Class Work, etc.) you are missing. Or, if you already have the right number of Assignment Groups, edit the names to match the categories in the syllabus. If you have too many Assignment Groups, which can happen when you import content, you can delete the extra. For all options, please see this help guide on adding and managing Assignment Groups.
2. Move your activities into the appropriate Assignment Group and in the right order in that group. Reorder Assignment Groups to match the order in the syllabus.
3. If you want to weight the final grade, weight your Assignment Groups.
4. Ensure all activities have the proper point value. Keep in mind if you have already graded an assignment, changing the point value of an activity will mean you will need to manually regrade.

Check Grades

Once you have verified everything is correct on your Assignment Index Page, you will want to check the Grades. The order of the activities in Grades is determined by their order on the Assignment Index Page, with the Assignment Group totals at the very end. You can rearrange the columns or filter the gradebook, but keep in mind this will only impact your view, not your students' view. Unpublished activities are not counted in grades. You can hide the unpublished items so they do not clutter your view.

1. Ensure every student has a grade entered for every activity. This is important because anything left ungraded will not be counted towards the course total. It will not be counted as a zero, it will be completely ignored and omitted from the student's course total. This would mean a higher grade than actually earned for a student with late or missing submissions. Therefore you will need to make sure all students have a grade for each activity.
   
   1. 1. A paper icon in a cell means the student has submitted (or resubmitted), but that submission has not yet been graded. You will want to grade the submission:
         • • Enter a grade directly from the gradebook, or you can go to the Speedgrader for that activity to grade the ungraded submissions.
      2. A dash means a student has not submitted, and they have not been graded. If the student should receive a 0 you will want to enter a 0. There are several ways you can do so:
         • • To apply a score to all ungraded at once, go to the Total column header and click the three dots. Choose "Apply Score to Ungraded." Enter a 0 in the grade box, and choose whether to apply this to all ungraded activities or just ungraded activities that are past due. Click the Apply Score button. Reload the page to see the applied scores.
           • If you have set Due Dates for all your activities in your course, you can set a Missing Submission Policy for your course to give all missing submissions a default grade. This can be set up ahead of time so it works as activities are marked missing during the term.
           • If you don't want to apply a score to all ungraded and a Missing Submission Policy will not work for you, you can choose to set a Default grade for each activity individually. When doing so, do not check "Overwrite already entered grades" or you will erase the grades you already entered.
           • You can also just click on the dash in the cell and manually enter a 0. Repeat for every dash you see.
2. Ensure all grades are visible. If there is a crossed out eye icon at the top of a column, that means that column is currently hidden from student view. You will want to post the grades for that activity to make them visible.
3. Optional: change the course total to display as points instead of percentage. By default the course total is displayed as a percentage. If you are not weighting your final grade, then you can switch to display as points instead. This is not possible if you are weighting the final grade. Also, this is only available for the course total, it is not possible for the Assignment Group totals (which will always display as a percentage).
4. Optional: display a letter grade along with the course total. To do so, you will need to enable a Grading Scheme. We already have a default grading scheme created for you to use, but if that grading scheme will not suit your needs, you can create your own grading scheme.

Check an Individual Student's Grades

To ensure everything is correct, you might consider checking each student's grades individually. You might do this for a few students to spot check, or every student to verify grades and totals. There are two different ways to do so:

1. Use the Gradebook Individual View to view one student at a time.
2. View the student's Grades page to see the gradebook as the specific student would.

Submit Official Grades in MyCSUSM

Once you have verified the grades in Cougar Courses are correct, you will need to manually enter them in your grade roster in MyCSUSM. If you do not know how to submit official grades in MyCSUSM, please see the section "How to Submit Grades" at the bottom of this this help page from the Office of the Registrar. If you have questions about the process of submitting official grades, please contact the Registrar at registrar@csusm.edu.