Blanks in the gradebook are one of those things that can confuse instructors, and students from time to time. Let’s say it’s the first week of the semester, and Arnie Aardvark comes to you concerned about his grade. You aren’t worried as he received 100% on his first assignment. However, Aarnie says you have an “F” for him in D2L. So, you go take a look and sure enough, something doesn’t look right.
The reason this is happening is the rest of the grade items for the semester have not been completed yet. D2L is counting them as 0 when calculating the final grade. Most instructors prefer to ignore the blanks, especially when the assignment hasn’t come due yet. So, let’s see about changing this setting. It is done by going to Settings. This blue link is easy to miss in the upper right corner of your screen:
From here, we want to go to the “Calculation Options” tab.
From here, scroll down toward the bottom of this screen to an area called “Grade Calculations”. We have two choices. They are “Drop ungraded items” and “Treat ungraded items as a zero”.
Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Drop ungraded items– The advantage is you won’t have good students like Arnie coming to us scared about their grade. Or even better, you won’t have A students dropping our classes thinking they are failing. The disadvantage is, you have to be diligent about putting 0’s in for assignments that are past due.
Treat ungraded items as 0– The advantage here is, you don’t have to worry about putting 0’s in after the due dates pass as they are calculated as 0’s already. The disadvantage is, students will not get a running calculation of how they are doing in the class. Only at the end of the semester will the Final Grade be accurate.
We recommend choosing the “Drop ungraded items” option. If you use “Treat ungraded items as 0”, just be sure to communicate what you are doing with your students.
So, after clicking Save, and clicking Yes to the confirmation window, I come back to the Settings – Calculation Options window. Click on Close and then the Enter Grades tab to see that Arnie now has a more accurate view of how he’s doing in class as of today:
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