FAWeb Categories Setup Explained

Probably one of the most important aspects of setting up FAWeb if you are a teacher is adding assignments to your Gradebook so you can keep track of how the students are doing in your class. Lazing around on the beach and being out in the sun can start to fry your memory of how FAWeb works, (it even happens to me over the weekends and I don't get a whole summer vacation!) so here's a quick review of settings in the setup and what each means to you the teacher. I'll start with the Categories, and next time I'll cover Assignments.

When you click Categories, pay attention to the drop-down at the top of the grid labeled Determine marking column grades using: <category averages> or <assignment grades>.  Now take a deep breath; I'm going to ask you to make a decision.  I know it's early in the year, but you can do it!  Here it is: how do you want to calculate your grades? Does each assignment have a category then each category makes up a portion of the marking column grade, or do all the assignments go into one bucket and then averaged?  The category averages option might look like: homework 15%, quizzes 25%, and tests 60%.

Before explaining the Calculation type drop-down, let me cover the Factor column.  Factors are used to give weight to each category relative to other categories.  Using the above examples, we might set the factors for homework to 15, quizzes to 25, and tests to 60.  The total of the factors comes to 100, so each category is worth its weight divided by the total of the factors.  Therefore, homework would be worth 15 out of 100, or 15/100, or 15%; quizzes would be worth 25 out of 100, or 25/100, or 25%; tests would be worth 60 out of 100, or 60/100, or 60%.  Although our example adds up to 100, your factors do not have to add up to 100.  Remember the fun of reducing fractions in math class?  We can use factors of 3, 5, and 12 for homework, quizzes, and test categories respectively and get the same results:

1.  3+5+12=20 total factor
2.  3/20=15% for homework
3.  5/20=25% for quizzes
4.  12/20=60% for tests

Keep in mind 0 is also a legitimate option for a factor and, as you might guess, it will take that factor and divide it by the total: 0/20=0%, so that category would not count towards the marking column grade at all!  And of course if you leave all of the factors at zero, you might run into the problem below, so be careful !

Finally, let's look at the Calculation type drop-down. You can select Total points and Percentages. Total points divides the points a student receives by the total available points for each category.  For example: you have 5 homework assignments worth 10, 10, 20, 25, and 50 points, and a student receives grades of 9, 7, 15, 17, and 34 points respectively on each assignment. 

Total points grade = (Sum of points received)/(Sum of total possible points)

Grade = (9+7+15+17+34)/(10+10+20+25+50) = (82/115) = 71.3%

The Percentages option uses the percentage of each individual assignment and then averages those percentages.  This calculation may sound similar to the Total Points but can give different results. For example:

Percentage grade = ((points received on assignment 1)/(points of assignment 1) + (points received on assignment 2)/(points of assignment 2) +...)/(total # of assignments)

Grade = ((9/10) + (7/10) + (15/20) + (17/25) + (34/50))/5
Grade = (.9 + .7 + .75 + .68 + .68)/5 = 74.2%

Whew...sorry, that was a little long!  But hope that helps you out in making these decisions on your Gradebook settings and provides you with a quick reference to use when setting up your Gradebooks.  Check back for a quick review of the Assignments page in Gradebook setup.  Oh, and welcome back to school!!