Your Teacher Gradebook: A Guide to Setting It Up Intentionally

Don’t grade everything.

This may be one of the most common pieces of advice from veteran teachers to beginning teachers who are struggling to balance the impossible teacher workload.

But what does “don’t grade everything” actually mean? We saw this question from a new teacher on Facebook, and it’s a good question.

Of course, there’s a simple answer: not every assignment needs to go into the gradebook, and when the end of the semester nears and you’re feeling overwhelmed, you should absolutely drop an assignment or two directly into the trash can.

But we do our best to be practical, and practically, we know three things: (1) students are unlikely to complete work they don’t believe will show up in the gradebook, (2) it is physically impossible to devote the same amount of time and attention to every assignment, and (3) a large number of completion grades will lead to grade inflation.

So, our best advice about how to prioritize which assignments you grade is firmly grounded in the way we set up our gradebook. We worked at a school that used weighted grading categories, and we found this way of setting up our gradebook to be an effective tool in helping us to make decisions about which assignments deserved our attention most while still holding students accountable for producing and submitting acceptable-quality work.

But we also learned quickly that we had to be intentional about setting up our gradebook and its categories, so we’re pulling back the curtain and breaking down exactly how we set up our gradebook (and why) to make our grading system as manageable as possible.

Why Your Gradebook Needs Weighted Category Grades

Thankfully, we are long past the days of handwritten grades in a paper gradebook, which would make weighted grades more trouble than they’re worth for those of us without advanced math degrees. Most gradebook programs allow you to create categories and to “weight” some categories heavier than others, essentially calculating students’ grades in such a way that not all assignments are counted equally.

The labeled categories make it easy for you and your students to see at a glance which part of your class, specifically, a student is struggling with and to emphasize the purpose of each type of assignment.

The weighted grades ensure that what’s most important to us—for example, essays in an English class—accounts for more of a student’s grade than the bits and pieces of work that keep our students learning but aren’t great indicators of their mastery of a subject or performance in our class.

When it comes to making grading more manageable, using weighted category grades in your gradebook is invaluable because it lets you be selective about which assignments to actually grade without letting credit/no credit assignments take up an unreasonable percentage of students’ grades. 

Selecting Your Gradebook Categories

You may, like us, have your gradebook categories set by your department, which leaves you with minimal control over the categories themselves, but you can be intentional about what you place within those categories.

If you’re part of the team that gets to set those categories, you’re at a school that doesn’t require the department to have the same categories, or you’re teaching an elective for which you get to create the categories, however, you’ll need to think through the types of work your students will be completing and how much of their overall grade you want to devote to each type of work, placing the most weight on the categories that are most indicative of students’ mastery of your subject matter or performance in your class.

Here’s how we broke down our gradebook after we made the decision to switch to a flipped classroom model with minimal homework.

Essays and Writing: 35%

In an ELA class, our main goal is to improve our students’ writing ability. Any assignment that went into this category is an assignment we read, graded, and provided some sort of feedback on. As a result, it was also the category of our gradebook with the fewest assignments in it.

These are the assignments that were most important to us, and we made sure that they were significant assignments. Projects only went into this part of students’ grades if they involved significant writing; steps of the writing process (e.g., prewriting, drafting, and revising activities) counted as classwork or class participation.

Classwork: 30%

Classwork also made up a significant part of our gradebook because it’s where we and our students spent most of our time, and it tended to be the way we measured students’ reading comprehension, the other priority in an ELA class.

For every text we read, we created an Actively Learn assignment that incorporated a mixture of multiple-choice and short-answer questions to guide students through the text. For the short-answer questions, we provided a clear paragraph structure, and we provided a score for each response with feedback about how to improve it. Students had the opportunity to revise these responses before the score went into the gradebook (note: we did not provide written feedback for these resubmitted responses).

We only included 1–2 short answer questions per assignment to keep the grading manageable, and those questions were worth more points than the multiple-choice questions (which we knew students could more easily cheat or guess on if they chose to).

Because we spent so much time on these assignments, we believed they were worth a significant part of students’ grades.

The other thing we included in this category of the gradebook was creative projects that didn’t necessarily include a lot of writing (or merit an essay grade). This included things like our end-of-novel flip book activity for AP students or Instagram posts for a character from The Odyssey. We graded these assignments, but we usually used a simple rubric that allowed us to grade them relatively quickly and provide feedback, typically without writing personalized comments.

Class Participation: 20%

Before we started using a flipped classroom model, our participation grades were based much more on discussion and used as a classroom management tool. But once we switched to the flipped classroom model, the way students participated changed as well. This category is where we put the little daily assignments that kept students learning but weren’t worth our time and effort to grade them with a rubric or provide personalized feedback on.

Everything in this category was graded based on completion: students got points for it, which made them more likely to do it, but we didn’t spend any of our grading time on it beyond making sure it was done. 

This, by the way, was the category of our gradebook with the most assignments in it.

Assessment: 15%

This is probably surprising for many of you: assessments make up the lowest part of grades in your class?!?!

Yes. But it’s because our true assessments of student learning, the assessments where we had the most control over whether students were doing their own work, were the writing assignments. Additionally, at our school, assessments meant “tests” (multiple-choice or short-answer). While you could use an in-class essay as an “assessment,” students, parents, counselors, and administrators would have been surprised to see it appear outside of the writing category. 

For many years, assessments counted for about as much as essays did. But the majority of the assessments in this category were vocabulary tests and reading exams, which were much more about holding students accountable for their reading than for truly measuring their comprehension and analysis skills (we did that through our Actively Learn assignments).

For us, these tests were just NOT as important as a student practicing the foundational skills for the discipline (class participation), demonstrating an ability to close read and analyze a text (classwork), or writing an essay conveying their understanding of a text or topic in academic language (essays and writing).

As assessments become increasingly digital, it becomes more difficult to monitor student cheating. Gone are the days of looking for wandering eyes, awkwardly placed hands, and small slips of paper filled to the brim with writing. Sure, we could use GoGuardian and randomize the different versions of the test, but that’s about it. So instead of worrying about it, we made it worth less in the gradebook and focused our attention on the assignments we had more control over.

Deciding What Goes in the Gradebook

Because we wanted our students to feel like their work mattered, we put every assignment in the gradebook. Anything that students received merely a completion grade for counted as “class participation,” and anything we took the time and effort to actually grade and provide feedback on went into the other categories, primarily writing and classwork, which cumulatively accounted for 65% of students’ overall grades.

Here are some of the questions we asked ourselves when deciding whether to grade an assignment or count it as class participation:

Weighting within the Gradebook Categories

It is important to pay at least a little bit of attention to how much assignments are worth within the categories. We tended to make in-class essays worth more points than out-of-class essays (since students were more likely to produce original work). We made sure vocabulary quizzes weren’t worth as many points as reading comprehension quizzes. A single-day worksheet was worth less points than something students worked multiple days to complete.

This is probably common sense to most of us, but sometimes we forget to pay attention to this and then wonder why students’ final projects are making no difference in their overall grades, only to discover it’s because they have 4 million points for vocabulary flashcards.

Be Thoughtful about Extra Credit

We also learned to be thoughtful about the kinds of extra credit we assigned and where we placed that extra credit.

Most of our extra credit, particularly when it required minimal effort on the student’s part, went into class participation. Sure, we wanted to give students an opportunity to boost their grades, but we never wanted attending a school play or completing a crossword puzzle to count the same as (or more than) an assignment we had taken time to create and grade.

If we did offer extra credit in another category, we made sure it was held to the same standard as work in that category: it took time and effort to complete, and we took the time and effort to give it feedback. As a result, these opportunities were few and far between.

And, speaking from experience here, you’ll want to make sure you’re okay with the number of extra credit points you’re assigning compared to the number of points already in that category!

Use Your Gradebook as a Form of Communication

When you’re trying to minimize your grading workload, use the comments and status indicators in your gradebook to provide feedback and communicate with parents. Sometimes, you can put a quick “Nice job” or “Remember to use MLA format” in the comments instead of writing detailed responses. Sometimes you can copy-paste a reminder about revision deadlines in everyone’s comments instead of providing personalized feedback. Sometimes you can mark an assignment “late” or “incomplete” with the click of a button instead of writing an email.

Using these ready-made features in your gradebook allows you to provide feedback to students and parents without adding to your overflowing workload. Just be sure students know to look for these comments and where to find them!

One Final Reminder: Help Your Students Understand Grade Categories

If you do use weighted grade categories, it’s worth taking the time to explain to students how they work. If your students are anything like ours, they’ll complete 15 Nearpods for a completion grade but refuse to submit an essay and then wonder why their grade didn’t go up to the “A” they were hoping for.

Students need help understanding that some assignments are worth more than others when you use weighted categories in your grading.

We definitely agree with the conventional wisdom: don’t grade everything. But we’ve found that setting up our gradebook intentionally with grading categories allows us to make our grading workload a little lighter while still holding students accountable for completing assignments and demonstrating mastery of the subject matter.

And if you’re trying to reduce your grading workload, we also recommend using a quick and easy rubric that allows you to provide feedback without writing personalized comments. Sign up for our Free Resource Library and gain access to our go-to simple rubric!