Design Your Live Gradebook
with D2L's Grades Tool
Overview
This page overviews how to use the D2l Grades Tool to create D2L "Categories" (i.e. categorical folders) and D2L Grade Items (i.e. learning activities to be assessed). We recommend beginning on paper, and then recreating your gradebook using the D2L Grades Tool by creating categories first and then populating those categories with grade items.
Open the Grades Tool
At Pima, find the D2L Grades tool under the Assessments tab in the D2L navbar.
Two Ways to Create a D2L Gradebook
From this point, we recommend using D2L's Setup Wizard and using all default settings in the wizard to create either a points-based or a weighted (percents-based) gradebook. Alternately, you can follow the steps below to begin creating categories and grade items.
For either approach to creating your gradebook, we recommend these practices:
Use a "Points" grading system due to ease of use for faculty and students.
Use Pima's default grade "scheme." The scheme reflects the range of scores needed to achieve a specific overall letter grade. At Pima, our default scheme reflects a common percentage "scheme" (i.e. 90 - 100 = A, 80-89= B), though this can be altered for individual courses if needed.
Step 1: Create Multiple "Categories"
What is a "Category?" D2L"s Grade "Categories" allow you to organize your grade items into folders to make your gradebook more manageable. From the instructor point-of-view, grade times are then organized in helpful category columns. We recommend creating categories for all grade items.
From the Manage Grades tab, click the blue "New" button and select "Category." Create as many categories as needed. Organize these categories in ways that will make sense to your students. These categories can be organized chronologically (First 8-Weeks, Second 8-Weeks), by multi-draft learning activities (Project 1, Project 2, Project 3), by D2L tool type (Discussions, Quizzes, Assignments), or any other approach you prefer.
As with most D2L tools, we recommend using the default options. To learn more, visit Creating Grade Categories in D2L at DePaul's Teaching Commons.
Step 2: Create "Grade Items"
From the Manage Grades tab, click the blue "New" button and select "Item." We recommend checking "numeric" for all activities.
Name that grade item and include a maximum point value (or weight). We recommend selecting "Can Exceed" in the event that you want faculty to be able to provide extra points within any grade item to recognize excellence/effort. We do not recommend selecting "Bonus" unless the entire grade item is a bonus item.
As with most D2L tools, we recommend using the default options.
To learn more, visit Creating Grade Items in D2L at DePaul's Teaching Commons.
Faculty FAQS
About this section: This section addresses common FAQS. If you have any to add, please visit our Contact Us page.
How do I access our text-and-image one-pagers showing this process?
When logged into your Pima Gmail, visit D2L Gradebook Setup (Points or Weighted)
How do I fix error messages like, " Your grade book shows "Grade Category sums to X%, not 100%"
This can occur when using a weighted Grade Book if the Grade Items in a Category do not add to 100. Check the weight of all the categories in your grade book, along with the weight of items not in a category Items that are in a category have their names indented. The total weight of all items within a category should add up to 100.