Skills: Create Skill Grade Symbols and a Grade Pool

Teachers use skill grade symbols to assign skill grades. The symbols are linked to a grade pool, which works like an umbrella or box for the grade symbols and is imported into the Gradebook Management Site, where you will later configure the grading cut-off values for each symbol.

1. On the Shortcut Bar in AdminPlus, click Report Cards, and then click Cust RC.
2. In the Customize Report Cards Plus dialog box, click Edit grade table, and then click Next.
   
3. In the Edit Grade Table dialog box, click Edit, and then enter the grade symbols that will be assigned to the skills, one symbol per empty row. Create symbols in the numerical order you want them to appear in the Gradebook Management Site.
   

   Although the grade symbols you create can be used for both standard and skill grades, we strongly recommend that you create entirely new symbols if your school has not used skill grades before.

4. Enter the quality points for each grade symbol.

   The quality points must be equidistant. In the following illustration, we created four skills: Exceeding (EX), Meeting (ME), Progressing (PR), and Not Progressing (NP). We used an equidistant four-point scale, with EX being the highest at 4 quality points and NP being the lowest at 1 quality point. We could also have used a scale from 0 to 3 instead of 1 to 4.

   
5. Click Accept to save your changes.
6. To create a grade pool and assign it to skills, click Create Grade Pools at the bottom center.
7. Click Add New [F2].
8. In Grade Pool Name, enter a name for the grade pool. The grade pool will be identified by this name in the Gradebook Management Site.
9. On the left, locate and click each skill grade you created previously, and then click to transfer each skill grade to the grade pool in the Selected Grades area.
   
   

   If a particular grade pool will be used for different skill types, select the Set as Default Grade Pool check box to apply the grade pool to all skills that don't have a grade pool assigned to them. You can override this default setting for any specific skill by manually assigning a different grade pool to it.

10. Click Done.