Using Grading Periods in Schoology
If you're the System Administrator for the Enterprise version of Schoology, check out Grading Periods: Best Practices for System Admins.
If you're a Basic Instructor in Schoology, check out How do I archive a course?
About Grading Periods in Schoology
Each course section can be associated with one or more grading periods. Grading periods give each section a start and end date, which allows for auto-archiving of past courses, as well as for the preparation of future courses.
Courses associated with current grading periods will appear in the Courses drop-down menu. Courses associated with past grading periods will display in the Archived area.
At the end of the school year, we recommend that you create a new section of the course, rather than using the existing course materials. Learn more in our End of the Year Guide for Instructors.
Grading periods may also help organize the Gradebook Settings in the course. The way in which you set up your Grading Periods should be determined by when and how frequently you need to report grades.
Best Practices
The Schoology Gradebook will automatically calculate an overall score for all materials in your course that combines each of the grading periods associated with your course.
That means if you teach a year-long course, you do not need to create a grading period that encompasses the whole year, like "2018-2019." Instead, create grading periods that correspond to any incremental dates when you need to report grades throughout the year. If your school or organization uses a four-quarter/two-semester calendar, you could simply create four grading periods - one for each quarter of the school year. In the screenshot above, the instructor has followed this practice, and as a result will be able to report a grading period grade for each student at the end of each quarter, as well as an overall grade that acts as a year-long grade and is a combination of the quarter grades.
