Re: Gradebook - Grade Names

[Wil Langford <wil@langford.net>]

On Thu, 10 Dec 1998, Eric Sandeen wrote:

>Even if you can get teachers to agree that grades will either be A+, A, A-, B+,
>B, B-.... or A,B,C,D.. you'll probably still need to be able to tweak the cutoff
  ...
>I'd suggest making some defaults (i.e., A>=90%, B>=80%, C>=70% etc) but also
  ...
>> > 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

Are there any grading schemes that couldn't, at the most basic level, be
stored as a value between 0 and 1 and then simply mapped to appropriate
names when the time came to display something?

It would simplify some of the backend code quite a bit.  Have something
like the following psuedocode:

Display("The student's grade is " +
	ReturnGradeName(string DisplayScheme, float Score) +
	" where the best possible grade is " +
	ReturnGradeName(string DisplayScheme, float 1.0000) +
	" and the worst possible grade is "
	ReturnGradeName(string DisplayScheme, float 0.0000)
);

Averaging of the scores gets easier, weighting them is no problem, you can
have one score / student / assignment and weight it at the end if
necessary, etc.

Any thoughts on the grade-name-map idea?

     . ._. .. _._. _._. ._ ._. _ __ ._ _. .. ... _ .... . __ ._ _.
I'm not schooled in the science of human factors, but I suspect surprise
is not an element of a robust user interface.  - Chip Rosenthal