You can create grade methods that do not use grades and instead use judgements/mastery pathways/descriptors such as Emerging, Developing, and Secure, etc. This would enable you to track whether students are improving over time and analyse class performance like you can for grade methods that use official grades. You could either set these up to be worth custom points or not worth any points, depending on which you might find more valuable.
1 / Create Grade Method
To begin, you would need to ensure you have your descriptors set up as a grade method. You can check your existing grade methods, or create a new one, in CONFIG. > Grade Methods > KS3/4 Methods.
To create a new method, click 'Create KS3/4 Grade Method'. Enter a clear name, select whether you want the method to use custom points or not, and select whether you want to use subgrades or not. Then click 'Next'.
Next, enter your descriptors in order from the highest value to lowest value, and how many entries you want the judgements to be worth. The Whole Grades can be a maximum of 8 characters in length, so you may have to shorten some of your judgements, for example, by shortening 'Developing' into 'Develop' or 'Dvlping' as shown in the screenshot below. If you have opted to use custom points, these will be entered into the middle column. When you are done, click 'Next'.
| If you have opted to use subgrades, you will then need to complete the next steps to set these up exactly as you would for other grade methods. For more details on setting up subgrades, see Step 3 onwards of our article KS3/4: Creating Grade Methods (Admin). |
The final step will be the confirmation page. If you spot any issues here, you can click the 'Previous' button to go back and correct it, or if everything looks good you can click 'Finish'.
Once you have set up your KS3 cohorts and created an EAP that uses this grade method, you can start uploading these judgement grades and analysing them in your reports in the same way you would any other grade method.
For instance, you could see how a student was performing compared to their expected EAP grade, like in the example below:
Or compare a report with one from a previous term to see whether students have shown improvement or not:
Thanks for reading!