Re: Gradebook

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 06:45:34AM +0100, Bill Tihen wrote:

> A truely useful gradebook for all teachers will be difficult, because there
> are so many systems of grading.  For example there is the US system A, B,
> C, D, F.  And there are US standards for what each grade gets then there
> are the German grades (7 - 10) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (1 is the best), then there
> is the German Abiture system (grades 11 - 13) 15, 14, .. 1 where 15 is the
> best.  I am sure there are different systems everywhere.  However, too much
> flexibility may lead to a difficult to use product, but just wanted to
> remind poeple to think this through so that the comprimises that will have
> to be made are known ahead of time.

The IMS tags manage this in the following manner:

a german teacher using any of our gradebooks would get data stored as:

<performance-coding> german </performance-coding>
<performance> 5 </performance>

a US teacher would get

<performance-coding> US </performance-coding>
<performance> C+ </performance>

and for the courses I teach/oversee that are mastery based,

<performance-coding> Mastery </performance-coding>
<performance> completed </performance>


There are many performance-coding in use and an infinite number imaginable ;
I have seen books full of various scales of assessment.  We can provide each
commonly used scale with a standard code name and another set of XML tags that
define them precisely.

Bruno