COPE Resources

How do I track grades?

The D2L Gradebook is used to track student course performance (Request to use a 3rd party publisher's gradebook must be approved by the VPI). Once a gradebook is created, you can link graded items back to their discussions, assignments, and quizzes. VTAC provides a step-by-step guide: Create a Gradebook with the Grades Setup Wizard

Additional Resources

• Difference between points and weighted gradebooks: vtac.lonestar.edu/help/c001
• Video walkthrough of setting up a weighted gradebook: vtac.lonestar.edu/help/a128
• Create gradebook categories: vtac.lonestar.edu/help/create-gradebook-category
• Create gradebook items: vtac.lonestar.edu/help/a168

Providing effective feedback is key to promoting student learning. Here are some best practices for providing feedback in the online environment:

• Provide timely feedback to students on their course performance
• Stay consistent with the grade return feedback timeframe communicated in the communication plan (see the Communicating with Your Students section) to students
• Keep an online current gradebook: Create a Gradebook in D2L

GradeMark Assessment Integration in D2L

Assessing student work can be one of the most time-consuming, yet ultimately rewarding parts of teaching. Thankfully there is a free resource available within D2L that can help to make the process of responding to student work a little less stressful and perhaps more engaging for students.  Use of the Turnitin tool, GradeMark, can help faculty provide advanced feedback to students while saving valuable time by offering comprehensive commentary quickly.

Faculty may already be familiar with Turnitin, which is a plagiarism detection software. GradeMark is a component of Turnitin that allows online text grading using standardized and customizable marks. In addition, there is also an “E-Rater by ETS” comprehensive grammar checker that can be enabled, which provides a comprehensive grammar checker. 

GradeMark allows faculty to customize and save content as well as add their own comments and edits. This can be helpful to use when commentary may be repeated often. For example, faculty may create a comment for proper/improper documentation of a source, complete with an example, that can be referenced for multiple students.

Figure 1: Image of Essay in GradeMark w Instructor Comments

Finally, faculty can create, share, and reuse rubrics In GradeMark to quickly calculate student scores.

For more information on using GradeMark, view the following VTAC resource: Use GradeMark with Assignments