Campus GradeBook should score well with instructors

By David Porreca

The paper grade book, for years the primary means by which
teachers kept track of their students' grades, may soon
become another casualty of the information age.

By next spring, researchers at the Computing and
Communications Services Office hope to have a computerized
grade book ready for UI faculty members, their teaching
assistants and students.

The Campus GradeBook is being developed by a CCSO team
consisting of Albert Liu, Bob Penka, Dale Sinder and Allan
Tuchman. Also involved in the project is the Division of
Measurement and Evaluation in the Office of Instructional
Resources, which is developing instructional material to
assist faculty members interested in using GradeBook.

Although the software is still in the prototype stage, CCSO
researchers hope to begin field-testing GradeBook in classes
during the summer and fall semesters. They anticipate
GradeBook will be available to large numbers of interested
faculty next spring.

Use of GradeBook will be voluntary, although the CCSO team
believes that instructors in large courses with many
sections will be attracted by the software's advantages over
traditional methods of grade-keeping.

In particular, GradeBook will provide a centralized and
easily accessible storage place for grade information on all
assignments in a course. A course director, for example, can
keep track of how students are doing in all of the course's
sections by calling up their scores on specific assignments
such as exams, quizzes, labs, homework or papers, or by
calling up their combined scores. The director can compare
sections to check for any major discrepancy in how section
instructors are grading. The director also can determine
what grade information section instructors and students
would have access to.

In addition, GradeBook can allow course directors or
instructors to sort through grades in a variety of ways,
such as calling up a chart representing in graphic form the
distribution of course grades, a useful feature for courses
that rely on grading curves. For students, meanwhile, the
advantage of GradeBook will lie in the ease with which they
can keep track of their own grades. Not only will all of
their grades be available from a centralized source, but
students in large courses will no longer have to try to find
their grades on printout sheets posted outside their
professor's office.

Students will be able to call up their scores in a
particular course by using any computer on the campus
network. Course directors or instructors will have the
option of allowing students to see how their grades compare
to the overall distribution of grades in the course.

"The Campus GradeBook is a way for instructors to keep track
of all their scores in a course by using a central book,"
said Albert Liu, one of the CCSO researchers working on the
software. "The flip side is that it allows students to see
their scores and to keep up to date."

But as Liu points out, any computerized method of keeping
grades must deal with the issue of security. In the case of
GradeBook, students will log in by using their network IDs
and passwords, which is the same means of authenticating
users that UI Direct employs. GradeBook users will have
access only to that information for which they are
specifically authorized.

When GradeBook is ready for release, Liu said, interested
instructors will contact the Division of Measurement and
Evaluation in the Office of Instructional Resources to set
up grade books for their courses. Software will be
distributed on line or on floppy disks.

Ultimately, Liu said, once GradeBook becomes available on a
large scale, the software may become a means for instructors
to transmit their final course grades to administrators
electronically.

But that prospect is still down the road. For faculty
members looking for an efficient way to manage unwieldy
batches of grade information, Campus GradeBook would appear
to have enough immediate advantages to pique considerable
interest.

"Some instructors use spreadsheets now," Liu said. "They're
nice for lots of calculations, but they aren't set up to
serve as grade books. The real advantage of the Campus
GradeBook is being able to give people access to information
from the same source - and only the information they're
allowed to see."