Adding Extra Credit Assignment Is Lowering Grades

Overview

Teachers add an additional extra credit task and students report that their final grade went down. This issue happens when you have more than one assignment created under the Extra Credit category - the bonus is divided between the graded assignments.

Diagnosis

When you create an Extra Credit category and define the Max Extra Credit value (for example, 5%), this value is divided between all assignments under the Extra credit category:

• If you have only one assignment and a student completed it with a perfect score, their final grade will increase by 5%
• If you have 2 assignments with an equal number of points, a student will receive a 2,5% improvement for each extra credit assignment completed with a perfect score.
• If there was one assignment completed with a perfect score and you added another one with the same amount of points, the student's grade will decrease by 2.5%.

Solution

There are three possible solutions:

• Create only one assignment under the Extra Credit category with a certain amount of max points (e.g., 10) and improve the grade for this assignment when a student completes extra tasks for extra credits:
  
  1. Open the corresponding course by clicking Gradebooks and selecting the course.
  2. Change the student's grade (for example, from 4 to 5) for the assignment under the extra credit category:
     
     
  3. Publish the progress report.
• If you want to have multiple extra credit assignments, create an Extra Credit category and publish all related assignments at once.
•  If you want to have multiple assignments and publish them one by one:
  1. Decide the Extra Credit value that a student should receive for completing your first assignment with a perfect score.
     As an example, we will use 2%.
  2. Create an Extra Credit Category with the Max Extra Credit value from the previous step.
     
     
     
     
  3. Publish the first assignment. Make sure to specify the number of points proportional to the percentage to easily calculate the point for future assignments.
     In this example, the assignment will have 20 points.
     
     
     
     
  4. When you want to publish the second assignment, increase the Max Extra Credit value by adding the percentage students will get for completing the new assignment. Follow steps 1-7 from the article Creating Extra Credit Tasks.
     In this example, our second assignment will give 3% of extra credit, so we will increase the value to 5%.
     
     
     
     
  5. Publish the second assignment with a proportional amount of points.
     Our assignment will have 30 points. In this way, if students complete the first assignment (with a perfect score) they get 2% increase, if they complete the second one - they get a 3% increase.
  6. Repeat steps 4-5 when you publish a new assignment.

Confirmation

The final grade for the students will not decrease when adding extra assignments. To test it, please follow the steps below:

1. Open the corresponding gradebook after creating the first assignment.
   
   
   
   
2. Enter the Grades for the extra credit assignment and click Save.
   
   
   
   
3. Check the updated final grades for students.
   
   
   
   
4. After increasing the Max Credit value and creating the second assignment, open the gradebook again (step 1 from the Confirmation section). 
   The final grades did not decrease and they are increased when the new assignment is graded.
   
   

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