Grading

Grading is how you decide what a student earned in a course and how you keep track of getting there. Seminary ERP gives you two places to work, and they fit together cleanly: a To-Do card that surfaces what's waiting on your attention, and a Gradebook that gives you the whole picture in a grid.

Overview

Grading in Seminary ERP is built around two ideas:

• Assessment Criteria define what counts toward the final grade for a course (the syllabus says "30% papers, 20% quizzes, 50% final exam," and the Assessment Criteria express that as rows on the Course Schedule).
• Submissions are what students hand in (a paper, a quiz attempt, an exam, a discussion post). Each submission gets graded against the Assessment Criterion it belongs to, then rolls up into the student's course total.

Some assessments don't have a submission at all — chapel attendance, class participation, an in-class presentation. Those use a special type called Offline, where you enter the grade directly in the Gradebook without any handed-in artifact.

Assessment types

When you create an Assessment Criterion (on the Course Assessment page), you pick a type. That type decides how the assessment is collected and how students submit (or don't).

Quiz

Auto-graded multiple-choice / true-false / short-answer style questions. Students take it in the browser; the system scores it the moment they hit submit. You can configure passing percentage and maximum attempts on the Quiz itself. Most quizzes need no instructor grading at all — but if you've added open-ended questions, those land in the Quiz Submission view for you to score.

Use this for: weekly comprehension checks, vocabulary drills, reading-confirmation quizzes, anything where the answer is mechanically right or wrong.

Assignment

A paper or file the student writes and uploads (PDF, document, image, URL, or text). Students see a prompt in the lesson, write or attach their answer, and submit. You then open each Assignment Submission, read it, and enter a score plus written feedback.

Use this for: essays, exegetical papers, reflection journals, project deliverables — anything where the student produces something you read carefully.

Exam

A more elaborate, often timed, in-browser test. Exams support multiple question types (multiple choice, open-ended, file upload), time limits, and per-question feedback. Auto-gradable parts score themselves; the open-ended portions are flagged "Not Graded" until you score them.

Use this for: midterms, finals, formal proctored assessments where you want a single linear test experience for the student.

Discussion

Threaded online dialogue. Students post their initial position on a prompt and reply to classmates. Discussions can be graded (linked to an Assessment Criterion) or free-form (just for engagement). Graded discussions can require students to reply to a minimum number of classmates' original posts; you set this on the Discussion Activity as "Minimum replies to other students". The system tracks each student's reply count and won't mark the discussion complete until the threshold is met.

Use this for: weekly conversation around the readings, case-study debates, peer feedback rounds — anywhere the interaction is the learning.

Offline

The catch-all for things you grade outside the LMS. There's no submission doctype, no upload, no scoring page. You just open the Gradebook and type the score for each student.

Use this for: chapel attendance, class participation, in-person presentations, oral exams, lab work, peer-evaluation scores, anything that lives in your notebook and you transcribe in. Create one Offline assessment per category so the weights still add up cleanly.

Where grading happens day to day

The To-Do card (top-right of every Course page)

Every Course Detail page shows a To-Do card on the right. For instructors and academic users it lists, in plain text:

• "Assignments to Grade — N", "Exams to Grade — N", etc. — one line per activity with un-graded submissions, with the count.
• Each line is a clickable shortcut straight into the grading queue for that activity.

This is your daily triage view. Open the course, glance at the card, click the activity with the biggest backlog. The card only shows things that actually need attention — empty queues collapse to "Congrats! No assessments to grade for now."

What's NOT in the To-Do card: Offline assessments. Since there's no submission to grade, they don't appear here. Use the Gradebook for those.

The grading queue (one activity at a time)

Clicking an item from the To-Do card takes you to the per-activity Submissions page. There you see one row per student, with their submission status (Not Submitted / Not Graded / Graded), original-post date or upload date, and any reply count for discussions. Click a student's row to open their submission, read it, type a score, leave feedback, and save.

This is the right place when you want to focus on a single assessment and grade it cohort-wide in one sitting.

The Gradebook (the whole grid)

The Gradebook (linked from every Course page) is a single table:

• Rows: every student in the course.
• Columns: every Assessment Criterion, in order, with weight percentage shown beneath the title.
• Cells: each student's grade for that assessment.

Three things to know:

1. Header links. Click any column title and you jump to that assessment's grading queue (the per-activity view above). The Gradebook is the natural launch pad when you're moving across assessments rather than across students.
2. Edit cells directly. You can type a grade in any cell. This is the only place to enter grades for Offline assessments — there's nothing to click into for those, since there's no submission. It also works as an override for the other types if you ever need to nudge a grade after the submission has been saved.
3. Save All Changes. Edits are tracked locally until you click the Save All Changes button at the top (or press Ctrl+S). The button shows how many cells have unsaved edits. This batches the writes so you can flow through the grid without saving every cell.

Extra-credit columns are tinted blue and show a "Max Extra: N" hint under the title instead of a weight, so they're easy to spot.

Rubrics

A rubric grades an assignment or a discussion criterion by criterion instead of with one number. Rubrics have two parts, and different people own each part.

The scale belongs to the school. On the Desk, under Rubric Scale, the academic office defines the levels every rubric uses, highest first. For example:

Level	Percent of the criterion	Description
Excellent	100	Goes beyond what the assignment asks.
Proficient	85	Does what the assignment asks. (meets expectations)
Developing	70	Partly does what the assignment asks.
Beginning	50	Does not yet do what the assignment asks.

Mark one level as Meets Expectations, and tick Default on the scale instructors should start from. A school can keep more than one scale. Once a student has been graded on a scale, its levels can no longer change. To change them, create a new scale and make it the default.

The criteria belong to the instructor. Open the assignment or discussion in the portal and use Add a rubric at the bottom of the page:

• Give each criterion a title and, if you like, a line about what is judged.
• Weight % starts out automatic: the criteria share 100% evenly, and each box shows the percent its criterion counts for. Type a percent to fix one criterion, and the blank ones share what is left. For example, with five criteria, fixing one at 5% gives each of the other four 23.75%. Clear a box to make it automatic again. You never need to make the weights add up.
• The levels come from the scale, and each one shows the scale's description. Use Write wording per level only where you want to say something specific, such as "Proficient: identifies the structure but misses the chiasm."
• Copy from… starts from a rubric you used on another activity.

Students see the rubric under the assignment or discussion prompt before they submit.

Grading. On the grading page, click a level for each criterion. You can add a comment under each one. Once every criterion has a level, the grade is computed for you on the course's grading scale, and the score box is hidden. For example, all criteria at the top level give the scale's maximum. Extra credit and late deductions still apply as usual. Once the work is graded, students see the level they reached on each criterion and your comments.

Changing a rubric after grading. A rubric that has been used to grade cannot be edited in place. Saving it from the activity creates a new version. Students graded earlier keep the version they were graded on.

Rubrics are not used in competency-based courses, which grade on the competency's own levels, or in courses graded on a descriptive scale.

A typical week

A common rhythm for a seminary instructor:

1. Monday morning — open the course. The To-Do card shows "Assignments to Grade — 8". Click it, work through the eight submissions one by one, save each.
2. Mid-week — the discussion deadline passes. To-Do card now shows "Discussions to Grade — 12". Open the queue, see the "Replies" column (X / Y format when a minimum is set) so you know at a glance who hit the participation requirement and who didn't. Grade the ones who met it; reach out to the ones who didn't.
3. End of class session — open the Gradebook, find the "Class Participation" (Offline) column, and type in scores for the students who spoke up well. Hit Save All Changes once.
4. End of term — open the Gradebook to see the full grid, spot any missing cells, fill in the last few Offline assessments, and verify the totals look right before publishing final grades.

Setting up an assessment plan for a course

Before any of the above works, the course needs Assessment Criteria defined. From a Course Schedule, click Course Assessment to open the configuration page. Add one row per graded thing in the syllabus:

• Pick the type (Quiz / Assignment / Exam / Discussion / Offline).
• For non-Offline types, link the actual activity (the specific Quiz, Assignment Activity, etc.).
• Set the weight (percentage of the final grade) — or tick Extra Credit and enter max points, in which case the row counts on top of the 100% rather than against it.
• Optionally set a due date — used for the To-Do card's "Due Soon" list and for marking late submissions.

The total weight of non-extra-credit rows must equal 100 before you can save. The page shows a running total at the top in red until you get there.

Tips

• Don't grade in the Gradebook by default. Clicking through the per-activity queue gives you the full submission view (the file, the rubric, the feedback box, prior comments). The Gradebook is for Offline grades, overrides, and end-of-term sweeps.
• Use Offline liberally. Anything that lives on a clipboard or in your head — attendance, oral exam scores, peer evaluation totals, presentation rubric scores — becomes a clean column in the Gradebook the moment you add an Offline Assessment Criterion.
• One Offline row per category. A single "Participation" row combining attendance, oral engagement, and group work is fine when the syllabus describes it that way. Splitting them into separate rows is fine too — students see the breakdown and you can weight each piece.
• Discussion replies count toward "complete," not toward the grade. The minimum-replies setting controls when the discussion is marked complete on the student's outline and To-Do. The grade itself is whatever you enter on the Discussion Submission — you can reward participation with the score, deduct for missing it, or use a separate Offline assessment if you want to track participation apart from the discussion's content.

Related

• Discussion Activities — setup and reply requirements
• Enrollment — who appears in the Gradebook rows
• Withdrawal — how withdrawn students are represented
• Graduation Requirements — non-course evidence that complements graded coursework