Create Grade Columns / Items

The first thing that has to be done when building any grade book is to set up the grade columns, or grade items.  These will hold assignments, quizzes, exams and projects for your course.  View the following video tutorial, or the written instructions below to create a grade item in your course.

To create a new Grade Item, navigate to your course and clicking the Grades tab. Then, click on “Manage Grades”.

manage grades tab

Our grade book starts very empty.  So, we are going to add a “New Item” by clicking on “New” and then “Item”:

new button and item link

D2L will then bring up all the different types of Grade columns you can add.  For this example, we’ll create a grade item named Chapter 1 Questions that’s worth 5 points. The Item Type we’ll want is Numeric.

list of grade item types

This brings up our New Item form.  We will need to fill in a few boxes to let D2L know about the assignment:

  • The Name in our example is Chapter 1 Questions.
  • The Short Name can be left blank. If you’d like the grade column to have a shorter name in the grade book, you can add it here.
  • Grade Categories are covered in another help article if you’d like to sort your grade book into different categories.
  • We’ve chosen to set the Max Points for this assignment as 5.
  • Can Exceed allows for scores over the Max Points. If you want to add in extra credit to an assignment, make sure “Can Exceed” is checked
  • Check Bonus if you want the whole assignment to be Extra credit.
  • Exclude from Final Grade Calculation allows you to have an assignment to be ungraded, and not count towards a student’s final grade.

The remaining options should be left with the defaults.  If there’s a feature you would like to learn more about, please contact us at elearning@pikespeak.edu.

When you are done, click Save and Close. 

As you can see below, we now have a Grade Item named “Chapter 1 Questions” worth 5 points.

Manage Grades window with new grade item created

Repeat this process of creating grade items until you have all the grade items needed for the course. 

Entering Grades #

When you are ready to enter scores, click on the “Enter Grades” tab.

This will take us back to the default “Enter Grades” page and you will notice there is a column named “Chapter 1 Questions” out of 5 points. Click on the downward arrow next to the title and then click “Enter Grades”.

You’ll now be able to enter scores for all your students. Make sure to click “Save and Close” when finished.