Grading Periods: Best Practices for System Admins

Best Practices for using Grading Periods in your Enterprise Organization

Grading periods are tricky and we are here to help! For each school year that you use Schoology, you must create new grading periods. Configuring your grading periods correctly for your organization is vital to ensuring courses are available at the desired times and overall grades are calculated correctly based on your district's grading tiers.

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, and preparation of future courses.

Courses associated with current grading periods appear in the Courses drop-down menu for the instructors and students enrolled in the course. Courses associated with past grading periods appear in the Archived area for those roles at your organization who have permission to access archived courses.

Grading periods organize the graded materials within the Gradebook of your course. How you set up your Grading Periods should be determined by when and how frequently you need to report grades.

Grading Periods in the Schoology Gradebook

The Schoology gradebook automatically calculates an overall score for all materials in your course that combines each of the grading periods associated with your course. Create grading periods that correspond to any incremental dates when you need to report grades throughout the year.

We recommend that you confirm the structure of your grading periods before provisioning courses and allowing instructors to build out course materials. This is because changing the grading periods associated with a course will move any course materials currently associated with a grading period to No Grading Period. These materials can be re-associated with the correct period using the bulk edit tool.