Grading Periods - Year 2 - What happens?

joseph_allen
Community Champion
‎03-31-2016 07:42 AM

This past school year, we implemented grading periods.  It has been very helpful in enabling teachers to grade and students and parents to view grades in a traditional quarterly format for our K12 district.  Over the year, Canvas has been helpful in adding grading period filters to the Canvas browser, adding grading periods to gradebook export reports, and adding the grading periods to the mobile app. More needs to be done like enabling admin options for locking or unlocking once a grading period passes and allowing grading periods to overalp, but its been a good start so far.  But now it's time for summer school and Year 2 of grading periods.

Question - Grading periods as is, while helpful in many ways, seems to be very limited in the sense that they cannot overlap and I'm also wondering as we begin summer school and the next school year, what we do with all of this year's grading periods? Was the intention that they be deleted and we create new ones?  If so, all of school year 15/16 grades will be mixed across grading periods and become virtually worthless since grades are done on a quarter, not a full year aggregate in K12.  If that is the case, then we need to somehow take a snapshot in time of all grades and assignments by grading period so we have that type of permanent record.   If I keep the grading periods from Sy15/16, the list begins to build and get longer.  When you click the filters, you'd see all grading periods from Sy15/16, Summer school, SY16/17 and so on.  That is obviously not intuitive or user friendly.   What are your thoughts on moving from year to year with grading periods while some how archiving or preserving the original courses and grading periods? Is that even possible?