Calculating Extra Credit Marks in Grade Center | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

by Dave Burns, School of Hospitality and Tourism
(with many thanks to Jennifer Peters for adding screenshots)

in the December 2020 issue

The weighted column is so useful for tracking student progress throughout your course. You can show marks for each assessment, but you can also use the weighted column to do some complicated calculations for you automatically. In the September 2020 issue of the Academic Newsletter, we showed you Categories and the Weighted Column: Using Grade Centre to Automatically “Drop the Lowest Grade”; in this issue, we will show you how to use it to calculate extra credit for the term.

Important note: the value of the extra credit column will not be arithmetically correct until all course marks are posted. You may want to hide the column from your students until all marks are posted at the end of the semester

1. First, make sure you have a “Weighted Column” in Grade Center with percentages assigned for each assessment in the course. To learn more about the weighted column, see the Teaching & Learning Centre’s module on how to Configure Weighted Grades.
   
2. Now we will create two new columns to do our calculations for us. For the first new column, select “Create a column” to create a new column for the extra credit you will award. Title this column “Extra Credit” or something similar and assign it “0” points for “Points Possible.” Under Primary Display, decide what format you will enter the extra credit in, either score or percentage.
   
3. The second new column is a Total column. Select “Create Calculated Column” from the dropdown and choose the “Total Column” option.
   Give this column a title such as “Weighted with Extra Credit” (or a similar name). In the Primary Display, choose Percentage or Score or Letter, whichever format you prefer the value to display as.
   

   Under Select Columns, choose “Selected Columns and Categories.” Move the Weighted Column and the Extra Credit column to the right so that those 2 columns are now being used in calculating the Weighted with Extra Credit value. Leave “Calculate as Running Total” as Yes. Under Options, leave “Include this column in Grade Center calculations” as Yes.
   

4. The new columns will appear at the end of your Grade Centre list. If desired, you can reorganize your view of the columns by selecting “Manage > Column Organization” and move the three columns to be beside each other:
   
5. When you add extra credit marks into the extra credit column, you will see the “weighted with extra credit column” value change. In this example, I added 5 bonus marks into the extra credit column which changes the “weighted with extra credit” percentage, but not the regular weighted column percentage.
   

View an excellent, comprehensive video on using the Grade Centre to add extra credit below:

Configuring Extra Credit video

View the December 2020 issue of the Academic Newsletter.