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Grading for For-Credit Courses

For-credit grading policies and best practices vary by degree program (e.g., MSLS, EMPA, etc.). Check with the program’s IDD for specific guidelines, including required rubrics, grading scheme, and other program-wide policies. In some cases, grading decisions are left to the course author.

Faculty generally provide students with a full downloadable syllabus that includes information about how the course will be graded. Be sure the course settings and syllabus are aligned.

In general, all graded assignments and discussions should use a rubric. The details are often at faculty’s discretion, but we can provide examples and recommendations when needed. CTI provides faculty resources for rubric development, as well. (CTI Rubric Development Guidelines)

Asynchronous Courses

When drawing upon existing eCornell certificate courses, maintain the grading settings and rubrics used in the source courses whenever possible. Review the standard settings with the teaching faculty or the program IDD to ensure they’re appropriate. 

When combining multiple non-credit short courses into a single for-credit course, it may be useful to separate the assignments into groups on the course Assignments page in Canvas. If additional assignments are being added, determine whether they belong in their own assignment group or groups for grade weighting purposes.

Things to consider:

  • Who is instructing and grading, eCornell facilitators or the faculty author?
  • What course grading scheme should be used? (Check with IDD or program resources.)
  • How does the instructor want the gradebook to look? What do they want students to see?
  • How many times does the instructor want students to be able to take quizzes or submit an assignment?
  • Will any new graded components be added to the course? If so:
    • What rubric should be used?
    • What assignment settings should be used?
    • How are grades for new assignments weighted against the grades for existing assignments? (See the Using Weighted Grading CTI resource for more information.)
  • Will any synchronous classes or meetings be added, online or in person? If so:
    • Is there an attendance or participation component that counts toward a student’s grade? You may need to add an assignment page with no submission for faculty to manually add the students attendance and/or participation grades in the gradebook.
    • How is attendance and participation being tracked?
    • How are attendance and/or participation grades weighted against the grades for other assignments?

We recommend that the instructor, faculty, or TA add available and due dates for each asynchronous assignment to help keep students on track and to ensure the person grading isn’t overwhelmed by assignments at the end of the course.

Synchronous Courses

In most degree programs, there is no set number or type of assignments required for a synchronous course, and faculty may approach grading however they’re most comfortable. 

Things to consider:

  • What course grading scheme should be used? (Check with IDD or program resources.)
  • How does the instructor want the gradebook to look? What do they want students to see?
  • Is there an attendance or participation component that counts toward a student’s grade?
    • If so, add an assignment page with no submission for faculty to manually add the students attendance and/or participation grades in the gradebook.
    • Faculty may instead choose to use the Roll Call attendance tool available in canvas.cornell.edu for this purpose if they already use it for other courses. CTI provides support for managing attendance in Canvas.
  • Will certain assignments, graded discussions, or quizzes be grouped together for grading purposes?
    • If so, create appropriate assignment groups on the Assignments page in Canvas and weight each group appropriately. See the Using Weighted Grading CTI resource for more information.
    Note: The overall grade for an assignment group is determined by adding all points earned for assignments in that group and dividing the total by the sum of all points available in that group.
  • How many times does the instructor want students to be able to take quizzes or submit an assignment?
  • Will students work in groups?
    • If so, will all students in the group receive the same grade for group assignments?
    • Will teammate evaluation be a component of the grade?

Tools Available in Cornell's Instance of Canvas

Some Cornell faculty members may be accustomed to using other Canvas-integrated tools related to grading and expect to use them in their for-credit courses. Information and support related to these tools are available in the CTI Tutorial Library. The most commonly used are:

  • Turnitin plagiarism detection (To enable for an assignment, select “Turnitin” from the Plagiarism Review menu in its settings.)
  • Rollcall attendance tracker (To enable, go to the Navigation tab in course Settings. Pull the “Attendance” option to the top section of the page and click Save.)

How did we do?

Grading for Not-for-Credit Courses

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