Overview

This article describes Gradebooks in School Loop, which is one of the core functions of the product. This article covers in detail Gradebook features and settings, Sections (as part of Gradebooks), and integration of Gradebooks with Google Classroom.

Gradebooks work as virtual scorecards for a given course. They are populated manually by teachers and contain the student’s roster, assignments, and scores. Gradebooks can be active for one or more terms and are only available to School Loop Plus customers.

Topics

Terms and Courses

Usually, teachers create a separate gradebook for each Term (semester or quarter) by configuring the start and end dates of the gradebook.
Courses and Sections are imported from SIS and assigned to teachers. Sections are also called Periods - it is a set of students who learn a certain course at a certain time (e.g., 1st lesson or 3rd lesson). Whereas, Term is a date range for a whole school like semester or quarter. Hence, don't confuse Periods with Terms - in School Loop they are different. Gradebooks can contain several sections.

For example, this is an Algebra course, which includes two sections (5 and 6). Each Section includes different students but usually, they have the same assignments. All these assignments are grouped and displayed within a gradebook.

Assignments are manually created by the teachers. Once students complete the task, teachers need to grade the assignment and publish a Progress Report. Once it is published, students and parents can review the grades.

Unpublished assignments have a gray X icon above their names, while published assignments will show a green round icon.

Sections

At the beginning of the term, teachers may need to move sections assigned to them from one course to another - in case a section is accidentally assigned to the wrong course or if they want to have each section under a separate course. This allows teachers to have a dedicated gradebook per section and implement different settings for gradebooks.

Teachers can move sections only while there are no assignments created. If they have created an assignment, the section can be moved only by a School Administrator. When moving a section, all students are moved to a different course, but the assignments and grades stay in the old course (hidden) - teachers will need to manually re-enter assignments and grades.

Teachers may report that a section is missing; such issues are caused by a mistake in SIS, which can be resolved only by the person handling SIS data for the school.

Gradebooks Usage and Issues

Teachers can create new gradebooks (e.g., they need to have a separate gradebook for a quarter) and delete unnecessary ones. As gradebooks do not actually store any assignments or grades, they can be easily restored (recreated for the same date range).

Also, teachers may ask how to access their gradebooks for the previous term or view grades for dropped students.

Graded assignments may not be reflected in the final grades and progress reports when teachers:

Have assignments that are worth 0 points.
Use custom codes that have only Zero or Does Not Count values.
Assignment Categories that are used have 0 weight (when Grade Weighing is enabled).

For more information, please review the following articles:

Gradebooks Configuration

Gradebooks have a wide variety of settings. We will cover the most commonly used ones.

Teachers can create new assignment categories. They are visible to students and parents when the assignments are published. Also, they are used to configure grade weighting.

Once grade weighting is enabled, teachers can create Extra Credit tasks, which can increase the final grade by a certain percentage. They will not decrease students' final grades if not submitted or if completed with a low score. However, teachers may report that when they add an Extra Credit assignment it lowers a student's grade - this happens when the extra credit category is weighted (which is incorrect) or when a teacher adds an additional task and the extra credit percentage is divided between both assignments.

Teachers can create custom codes to use them instead of points. They provide additional information for students and parents (e.g., zero points for not submitting the task at all) and add the function to exclude an assignment from the final grade (e.g., the student is excused and the missing task will not affect their grade).

Teachers can also create custom grade scales. It enables them to set up different floor percentages for traditional grades ( e.g., C starts from 75% instead of 70%) or create unique final grades (e.g., Pass or In Progress, etc.). During distance learning, a lot of teachers had to switch to using Credit/No Credit custom codes.

Google Integration

A lot of teachers are using Google Classroom, especially during distance learning. School Loop Gradebooks can be integrated with Google Classroom to automatically import assignments and grades to School Loop.

However, first, District Admin needs to submit a ticket to enable Google Classroom integration for their district and import students' Google IDs (email addresses) into School Loop as grades are imported based on student email addresses and IDs.

<supportagent>
Note: Currently, there is no way for agents to check if the District has imported student Google IDs when troubleshooting - agents need to ask the District member responsible for data imports to check and confirm that they imported the IDs.

</supportagent>

If the integration option is not enabled, teachers may report that the Syncing with Google Classroom Option is missing.

Once the integration is enabled, teachers can import grades from Google Classroom.

Please note that, according to Google Classroom requirements, students must use Google accounts provided by their school when working with Google Classroom. In other words, they cannot use personal @gmail.com accounts. However, students can use their personal email addresses to log in to School Loop. This does not affect integration with Google Classroom because Google IDs are imported via Sloopy and are stored separately from student emails associated with their accounts.

Gradebooks