Why use Grade Matter for grade calculation, submission, and approval?
Reduce Risk
By automating and centralising the grade calculation process, Grade Matter reduces systemic risk, and provides comprehensive audit functionality for improving grading integrity and regulatory compliance.
While Grade Matter allows instructors to adjust grades with ease, it also enforces the university’s grading schemas by restricting the instructor to the appropriate set of grades for a given final mark.
This ensures that, after making any required changes, student grades will remain accurate and correct.
Grade Matter records every mark change, grade change and comment made by an instructor. This leaves a digital ‘paper trail’ that allows other parts of the organisation to easily follow the development of an individual student’s final grade.
This information is invaluable should the accuracy of a student’s final grade ever be called into question, and can be used to provide evidence of grade management policy and procedures for regulatory compliance.
Improve visibility and transparency
By centralising the grade process and controlling all changes to final marks and grades, Grade Matter provides improved visibility and transparency in the final marks and grades process.
Grade Matter allows instructors to adjust a student’s grade directly in the system, while recording every mark change, grade change and comment. This leaves a digital ‘paper trail’ that allows other grade reviewers (such as faculty members, administrators and auditors) to easily follow the development of an individual student’s final grade. It’s also an essential tool that can be used for reference should the accuracy of a student’s final grade ever be called into question.
Grade Matter can prompt grade reviewers to provide a justification for a student’s grade change, which can then be read by other reviewers and the final grade approvers (i.e. the Faculty Assessment Board). This feature of Grade Matter enhances communication between grade reviewers and increases visibility and transparency across the whole grade calculation, submission and approval process.
Increase efficiency
Grade Matter has been specifically designed to increase efficiency by eliminating manual processes in the grade calculation, submission and approval process.
With Grade Matter’s ability to automatically pull students’ assessment results from the Learning Management System and calculate final marks and grades, instructors no longer need to spend what can be hours manually calculating and entering each mark and grade for each student.
The distribution charts allows an instructor to instantly see how many of their students achieved each grade, what the average and median marks are, and the standard deviation in the marks.
More importantly, Grade Matter allows for instant identification of grades of interest. The application can sort and filter borderline grades, students who missed or failed assessments, grades with comments from other users, and more. This enables instructors to easily see which students meet these criteria, meaning they can more quickly identify marks and grades that need attention.
Reduce workload and grading stress
Automated final mark and grade calculation and helpful review and moderation tools significantly reduce the amount of time course instructors spend on end-of-session grading.
The automatic grade calculation process isn’t the only way Grade Matter can reduce workloads to increase instructors’ productivity. After pulling and calculating students’ grades, Grade Matter presents a distribution chart and an overview of grade statistics.
A major issue for academics, especially in the current environment where higher workloads are a fact of life, is dealing with the stress caused by grading assessments and managing the grade process.
While grading will always require direct input from the instructor, Grade Matter significantly reduces the workload associated with the calculation, submission and approval process.
By addressing the causes of errors in the grading process, this will result in immediate improvements to the workload and stress level of instructors responsible for end-of-session grading.
Reduce errors
By providing flexible integration with existing systems, controlling inputs and validating data, Grade Matter reduces the risk of errors appearing in a student’s final results.
Instead of entering each grade into a spreadsheet by hand, instructors can now use Grade Matter to instantly pull assessment marks for each student from their university’s Learning Management System. Grade Matter automatically sums those marks together using curriculum data, like assignment maximum mark and weighting.
Grade Matter then translates the calculated final mark into a final grade, eliminating the need for the instructor to go through and manually assign a final grade.
Not only does Grade Matter automatically calculate students’ final marks and grades, but it can also identify any anomalies or grades of interest that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in a spreadsheet being manually compiled by an instructor. For example, marks that are “borderline” to a higher grade, or students that have missing assessments.