Prepare grade input

Prepare grade input to select the term and classes you want to enter and post grades for. You must prepare grade input before any office staff or teachers can enter grades for a grade term.

Prepare grade input for a term at any time. When you do, the columns for that grade term appear on the grade input pages in the School and Staff views – but teachers and office staff cannot enter grades in them until the first date of that grading term.

Example: If you prepare grade input for Term 2 at the beginning of the school year, teachers can view those columns in the Staff view, but cannot enter any information until the first date of Term 2.

When you prepare grade input, you can also define the date range during which grades can be posted either for all students or students with a specific year of graduation.

Note: If you grade using rubrics and want to copy the rubric scores of a selected term into the post columns of another term, run the Prepopulate Rubric Scores procedure, after you prepare grade input, to reduce manual entry.

To prepare grade input:

1. Log on to the School view.
2. Select Grades > Grade Input.
3. If you want to enter grades for specific course sections only, filter or select those classes.

   Note: To prepare grade input for class sections that do not currently contain any active students because they have withdrawn, select the Sections with only Withdrawn Students filter.

4. Select Options > Prepare Grade Input. The Prepare Grade Input wizard appears.

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5. In Step 1, Select Sections, select the sections you want to prepare grade input for.
6. Click Next. Step 2 of the wizard, Select Columns, appears.

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7. At the Report type field, select if you want to prepare input for term, progress, or course grades. Aspen will only prepare the columns that have the selected report type.
8. Select the grade term you want to prepare grade input for.
9. At the Replace Existing Columns checkbox, do one of the following:
• If it is not the first time you are preparing grade input for the term and you want to clear any grades entered in the columns for the term, select this checkbox. For example, if you are just implementing Aspen, you might prepare grade input for a few teachers to practice entering grades, then prepare grade input again for all teachers to enter grades. You would want to delete the practice grades the first teachers entered.
• If it is not the first time you prepared grade input for a term and you want to keep the existing values in the columns, do not select this checkbox. The system updates column attributes, but does not clear existing grades. For example, assume the administrator updates a column to accept numeric values after preparing grade input for the term. In order for the change to take effect in the grade input area, grade input must be prepared again. When doing so, the administrator does not select this checkbox, and the system does not clear any grades that already exist. However, the system does modify the column to accept numeric values.

10. Click Next. Step 3 of the wizard, Posting Parameters, appears.

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11. At Post Window, use the Start Date and End Date fields to define the date range during which teachers can post grades for this term.
12. Select if you want teachers to post for all students or only for students in a particular year of graduation. For example, because some high schools graduate seniors in early June, they need to post their final grades before the other students’ grades.
13. Click Next. Step 4 of the wizard displays a confirmation of your selections.

    Note: If something is incorrect, click Previous to fix it.

14. Click Finish.