Toddle provides you with an intuitive interface to configure the academic setup for your curriculum, such as setting up subjects, grading periods, grading methods, grade boundaries, and more.
Setting up grading periods is the first step towards configuring the grading system for your curriculum. Grading periods are usually aligned to the school’s reporting cycles such as terms or semesters. Read this article to learn how you can set up grading periods on Toddle.
Configuring Grading periods
It’s important to configure grading periods as they act as the foundation for the grading system. As an admin, you can define one or more grading periods for each academic year. Teachers create assessments that are linked to specific grading periods, and consequently, students’ performance is reported for each grading period taking into account all assessments associated with that grading period.
To navigate to the option for configuring grading periods, go to the admin portal, scroll to the ‘Programme level configurations’ section, and click on ‘Academic setup’ for the Diploma Programme.
To configure grading periods, select the ‘Grading periods’ option in the left pane. Here you can use the options on the extreme right to add (+ icon), edit (pencil icon), or delete (trash icon) grading periods. Grading periods can also be configured under the ‘Academic years and terms’ section in the School setup menu. To learn more, click here.
Once you click on the ‘+’ icon, you’ll have the option to add a new grading period. Here you can add a title and an abbreviation for the grading period, and further define its type by clicking on the dropdown menu. You can choose from the three types of grading periods:
Reporting period: Schools follow a reporting cycle, typically divided into terms or semesters. The grading periods for each term or semester assessing students' performance are called reporting periods. The start and end date of reporting periods usually corresponds with the dates of your terms/ semesters/quarters, etc.
Exam: This grading period works exactly in the same manner as the ‘Reporting period’. This is generally used by schools when they want to report students’ performance for a specific exam period.
Cumulative: These grading periods are used when schools wish to report an aggregation of students’ performance from one or more grading periods. For example, if schools wish to report students’ performance over two reporting periods they can use a cumulative grading period.
Keep in mind that you have the flexibility to adjust the start and end dates of grading periods at any point. However, once one or more tasks have been associated with a grading period, that grading period cannot be deleted.
In case you select a cumulative grading period, you can further decide which grading periods’ scores it will aggregate by clicking on the ‘Configure’ button. Here you can select from other types of grading periods such as reporting periods and exams or choose from already existing cumulative grading periods.
Once configured, you can also select the calculation method for cumulative grading periods. This can be done from the Grading setup>Cumulative scores. Here you can assign a weightage to each of the grading periods, based on which the aggregation is done.
Importance of Grading periods for Educators
Let’s explore the importance of grading periods from the lens of an educator. When creating a class task, whether it's a Formative assessment (FA), Summative assessment (SA), or Learning Experience (LE), educators are required to associate the task with a specific grading period. Teachers will be able to select a grading period from the ones set up by you in the academic setup.
For tasks with assigned maximum scores and a designated grading period, the platform aggregates the scores to calculate the overall performance for that specific grading period. These scores can be viewed within the Gradebook of a class. For instance, by selecting the Term 2 grading period in the Gradebook term filter, as shown below, teachers can view scores of all tasks tagged to Term 2 along with the corresponding total score for that period.
It's important to note that the configuration of how total scores are calculated for each grading period is customizable by school administrators. Further details on configuring the calculation method can be found in our comprehensive Grading Setup article, which you can access here.
We hope you found what you were looking for. Explore other articles for in-depth articles information on other components of the grading setup such as assessments, cumulative scores, etc.