Our Registrar went to completely online grading last fall

Our Registrar went to completely online grading last fall. We had piloted for the summer and found that it worked well. And our registrar says that the fall was the quickest and most accurate grading period that has ever been done. Some of the issues were

training - we did extensive training sessions for faculty
faculty has often had departmental secretaries write their grades on the grade sheets. The online system doesn't allow that kind of delegation - so faculty had to do it themselves. A bit of an issue but we talked it through.
Concerns that a student would get into the system and change a grade - web grading makes that no more easy or difficult than that has always been. We educated faculty on how the security worked and the reasons for individual sign-ons and not sharing them.

Pluses included shortening the grading period from a month to two week, no duplicate effort, once the grades were entered, they were done. Before someone had to sit in the Registrar's office and type them in. And the faculty found it easy.

We use the Web for Faculty component of Plus SIS.

Julie Ouska
CIO/VP of Information Technology
Mercy College
555 Broadway
Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522
(914) 674-7679 fax (914) 674-7514
jouska@mercy.edu

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We exploited our budget crises somewhat last year and didn't mail grades in order to save costs. Since then we stopped mailing grades all together, they are available on the web.

Karin Steinbrenner

Associate Provost and CIO

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

9201 University City Blvd

Charlotte, NC 28223-0001

Phone: 704-687-2347

Fax: 704-687-3868

e-mail ksteinbr@email.uncc.edu

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At Simon's Rock College we use a home-grown registrar/grades system

that has a web-based front end for submitting grades and comments. The

registrar uses FileMaker Pro; the web stuff is in php and postgresql.

We're using this system at two separate schools, one authenticates

through ldap; the other through the /etc/passwd file on the linux

system with the apache web-server that hosts the application. The

basic model is:

authenticate the faculty member; accept grade and comment (comments are

required here for every student); write the grade and comment to the

FileMaker db. There is an optional email message to the faculty member

with the submitted grade and comment. At the end of the semester we

display the grade and comment from the mid-term as well so the faculty

member can see just what it was that s/he said at midterm.

The registrar uses these grades and comments as/is, emailing a final

grade/roster list to the faculty so that they can check for errors and

send corrections if necessary.

If you would like further information, code, etc, send a message.

David Reed

Director, Computing and Media Services

Simon's Rock College of Bard.

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I helped implement an Electronic Grade Submission system (E-Grades) at the University of Saskatchewan. I presented a paper at CAUSE'98 on this. Slides from the presentation are at

http://duke.usask.ca/~deschner/cause98/

and the paper itself is on the EDUCAUSE website at

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cnc9816/cnc9816.html

The focus of this system is to move grades that are already in electronic form, usually a spreadsheet, into our Student DB with all appropriate approvals (usually department heads). It is not meant as an on-line grade book. It is in use in about 60% of campus, but generally faculty still give the grades to office staff to enter, even if they just do it in a spreadsheet and upload to E-Grades.

Hope this helps,

Alan

Alan Deschner, Project Manager , Student Information Project

Voice: 306-966-4846 w/v-mail | John Mitchell Building, Room 272

FAX: 306-966-2609 | University of Saskatchewan

mailto:Alan.Deschner@usask.ca | 118 Science Pl

| Saskatoon SK S7N 5E2 (Canada)

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I'll forward this to the administrative systems management list, which is focused on exactly this type of issue. I would suggest that you subscribe to that constituent group from <http://www.educause.edu>.

All of our grades are entered on the web. While there is no paper trail, there is an electronic trail. We don't have to print and distribute rosters, we don't have to collect them, we don't have to scan them, faculty can enter grades without worrying about mailing speed, but most importantly, students don't have to wait to see grades. We had to make a big sell for some professors. They don't care how much money is saved, and that students get grades earlier, so we sold it on the basis that they don't have to worry about sending and receiving printed rosters - a big pain for many.

Kevin Shalla

Director, Student Information Systems

Illinois Institute of Technology

<mailto:Kevin.Shalla@iit.edu>

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The University of Minnesota System has developed an on-line grade

submission system that serves all campuses. Here is a view from the

Duluth campus:

<http://www.d.umn.edu/faculty/grading/>

Note that you will not be able to access the second link on this page,

since it is password protected. But the other links should be

available.

Linda

____________________________________________

Linda Deneen, Director

Information Technology Systems and Services

University of Minnesota Duluth

ldeneen@d.umn.edu

(218) 726-7588

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Here at Wayne we implemented a totally on-line system for grade entry last September. We use Pipeline as a portal to Banner's Student Systems. We conducted a very large public relations splash, complete with a thick pamphlet

(http://www.inform.wayne.edu/pdf/quickstartguide.pdf)

which we distributed widely. We also sent teams around to colleges and departments to do presentations on how to enter grades under the new system. Lots of issues arose.

Since each individual faculty member has a separate logon to Pipeline, and courses were associated to individuals, only the faculty member of record could enter grades. This caused potential problems for jointly taught courses, directed reading courses, courses taught by GA's and courses with hundreds of students. We established a set of 'proxy graders', usually secretaries and executive assistants who could access courses without being instructor of record. There were severe platform and browser problems, especially for the first go-round, where it turned out that IE 5.5 couldn't display the second (and

subsequent) pages of a large class. That got fixed with a lot of midnight oil. There are still some residual problems with printing final grades with some platforms interacting with some browsers, but the data entry problem is largely solved. Anecdotal evidence from the Registrar's office is that grade entry was at a higher percentage by the deadline with electronic entry than it ever was with the previous scantron system, despite grumbling from some of my more curmudgeonly colleagues. One thing that has not been systematically solved is ensuring that individual departments have records of grades submitted. Wayne has lots of part-time and adjunct faculty, so many departments have required faculty to submit paper copies to the secretary after grades were entered. Not all departments are doing this, however, and I suspect those that don't will regret it in the end. All in all it has gone much smoother than anyone had a right to expect. People here can provide lots of additional details if there is interest, and our fees are quite reasonable ;-)

Geoff Nathan

Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan@wayne.edu>

Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology,

Wayne State University

Linguistics Program

(snailmail)

Department of English

Wayne State University

Detroit, MI, 48202

Phone Numbers

Computing and Information Technology: (313) 577-1259 Linguistics (English): (313) 577-8621

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We are a Datatel client and use the WebAdvisor module for this purpose.

All course grades are reported online. Students access their record

and can print a transcript at any time.

We also use the system for registration.

Paul Levit '71

Executive Director

Information Technology

Dickinson College

Carlisle, PA 17013

717.245.1256