We have the ability now to set up the final grades as pass/fail but the assignments are still based on the points system. There should be a way to have all of the assignments in a pass/fail course to also have the option to be set up as pass/fail for handing in the assignments as well instead of having to give points to all the assignments and then changing from a points system to a pass/fail for the final grade. In some classes there are just 1 assignment that would be handy to have this option with the other all being graded but on others it is all of the assignments. This option should be created.
Date
Votes
28 comments
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Toby Robinson Official comment There are now two new settings for an assignment:
1. Pass / Fail
Instead of having a alpha/numeric grade input/display you just select Pass of Fail.
2. Mandatory Pass
This assignment must be passed in order to complete the course. If you get a failing grade on it your course grade goes to an F.
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Joseph Schoolland Thank you for posting this, Laura. I'm not sure if we'll start working on this or not (we'll marked it Planned if we do), but for now what do you think about making each assignment worth only 1 point. That way you could treat it kind of like pass/fail with 1 being a pass and 0 being a fail.
Would that work?
Joseph
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Laura Wilson Yes, this is what we have done so far, but it doesn't really reflect the proper information when we are doing reports. Thanks for working on this.
Laura
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Molly Jones We agree that having the ability to mark individual assignments pass/fail would be tremendously useful!
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Jacob Lindsley I also concur!
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Jessica Babaker We are hard-pressed to be without this functionality, as well.
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Nathalia Mighty Any update on this Populi?
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Adam Sentz @Nathalia - Nothing to report.
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Nathalia Mighty Noted.
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Ken Deeks I vote for a P/F option for individual assignments as well!
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Grace Johnson I concur that this should occur!
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James Brooks Please reconsider adding or updating this feature, several instructors have requested it for lab and clinical assignments specifically.
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Kay Tronsen Has there been any progress on this issue?
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Kristen Houston Hello all - I am hoping to bump this to the top as well. Especially in this season where many schools are moving ALL courses P/F in response to COVID-19 we really need a P/F assignment option.
Thanks!
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Joel Wingo We have a strong need for this feature too. If "Pass" were an option on our grading scale for each assignment, we could avoid skewing our assessment reports by giving P/F certificate students a 100 when they meeting their modified threshold.
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James Hi all,
There definitely seems to be lots of interest in this feature, so I'd like to take a poll about how the math would work (there are several different options and it gets a bit tricky).
The credit in a course (points/weight/value/however you want to think of it) is spread throughout multiple assignment groups, and then broken down within each assignment group into individual assignments. So at the end of the day, each assignment has a certain weight which can either help or hurt the student's final grade.
So let's say someday we add P/F at the assignment level and you set up a P/F assignment. If the student passes the assignment, do you want them to either get a 100 or a 0 on that assignment and for that to be factored into the final grade, just like a normal assignment but with fewer options?
Or (as is more typical for P/F courses) do you not want Passes to factor into the final grade at all? In GPA calculations at the course level, typically passing a P/F course doesn't help the student's GPA at all - it just don't hurt them. But if they fail, then you add a 0 to the numerator and the weight of the course to the denominator when calculating the GPA (exactly the same as if they got a F in a non-P/F course with the same number of credits).
This has the effect of concentrating the importance that the remaining non-P/F courses have on the GPA - if you take it to an extreme and have a program with all P/F courses except one, then (assuming the student never fails any P/F courses) their grade in that one course determines their overall GPA in the program.
So if we did it this way at the course level, it would have some possibly non-obvious implications: let's say you set up a course with 5 separate 10 point quizzes and a final exam worth 50 points (100 points total). As the teacher, you think that the final is worth 50% of the course grade. However, if you decided to make all the quizzes P/F then the final is effectively worth 100% of the course grade for a student unless they fail a quiz. But the quizzes no longer help them at all (except by not hurting them), and even though you set things up where the final was worth 50% of the course, it's now worth up to 100% of the course grade (though its impact becomes less if the student fails some quizzes).
But there's now no way for the student to ever get a higher grade in the course than they got on the final - though of course lower is still possible by failing quizzes.
Maybe that's what the teacher expected, but I worry it would lead to some confusion. Alternatively, if we made P/F assignments factor either a 0 or a 100 into the final grade, then this feature would merely be a shortcut to save a few keystrokes but the math is no different from entering a 0 or a 100 in the current interface.
So if you have time, please post some feedback on which flavor of P/F assignment grade you'd want to use:
A) a Pass doesn't help but Fail hurts the overall course grade
B) both Pass and Fail affect the overall course grade
Thanks!
James -
Joel Wingo Thanks for describing the implications for us, James.
I would prefer option A, where a Pass doesn't help (same as if the assignment received no grade), but a Fail counts as a zero.
I would like to have the "P" (Pass) option that doesn't help alongside the regular A–F letter grades, so we could exclude a score from a student with a modified learning plan from the mean scores of all the other students who submitted an assignment.
There are some other cases where this would help, too, but this is the main one.
Thanks again for your consideration!
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Joel Wingo James, I see there is the "Excused" option that probably calculates the same way as the type of "Pass" I'm interested in. I'm not sure about everyone else here, but for me it would be enough to just duplicate the "Excused" option and give it a different name (Pass, "P" on the grade sheet).
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Jessica Babaker We would also prefer option "A".
We want to it to stand out when someone gets a zero, but for the grade to be unaffected when they get a pass. In our case, they do not receive a passing grade in the course if ANY pass/fail assignments have a failing grade (they have to correct the work until it is passing). For context, all of our courses are pass/fail, and nearly all of the assignments are also pass/fail.
Our grade letters are also unique, so it would be nice to customize the letters, and it would be necessary to be able to adjust the thresholds for "pass" and "fail" per assignment, so they are not just "P/F" and 59% and under=F. Specifically, we use "AC" for Achieved Competency and "LC" for Limited Competency, which is different from an academic standpoint than a pass/fail way of interpreting student progress. Our threshold for achieving competency also changes depending on the assignment, so the ability to specify the percentage threshold per assignment is important.
Right now we leave a comment with the actual grade, and then enter a 1 or 0, but it would be nice to be able to see the letter grade and the true percentage directly from the gradebook.
That is maybe more information than you asked for, but there it is! I hope it helps! -
Grace Johnson option A
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Adam Sentz Thanks, everybody. That confirms what we suspected: Pass works like Excused only it means "you did it" instead of "you didn't have to do it."
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Joel Wingo Great summary, Adam Sentz. I've also noticed some schools use "Credit/No Credit" (CR/NC) for this designation, which avoids using "F". Would be nice to have that label option too, especially for competency-based programs.
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Adam Sentz Thanks, folks. At this point we are pretty confident that people would like Pass to work like Excused only it means "you did it" instead of "you didn't have to do it." If you want to support this go ahead and click the up arrow at the very top.
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Hugo Córdova Quero Very necessary, especialy in the diverse ways to estimate students work beyond a productivity numerical option
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