Managing Learner Progress and Grades

Learner Grades and Grading

You can review information about how grading is configured for your course, and access learner grades, at any time after you create the course. You can also make adjustments to learner grading for a problem, for a single learner, or for all learners.

Generate a Grade Report for All Learners in a Course

For any course, you can generate grades and then download a file with the results for all learners in the course, including unenrolled learners. EdX recommends that you generate a grade report as soon as certificates have been issued for your course.

When you initiate calculations to grade learner work, a process starts on the edX servers. The complexity of your grading configuration and the number of learners in your course affect how long this process takes. You can download a report of the calculated grades in a comma-separated values (.csv) file when the grading process is complete.

You also have the option to review learner grades on the instructor dashboard. For more information, see Review Learner Grades on the Instructor Dashboard.

To generate and download the grade report for the learners in your course, follow these steps.

Because the grade report file contains confidential, personally identifiable data, be sure to follow your institution’s data stewardship policies when you open or save this file.

View the live version of your course.
Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.
To start the grading process, click Generate Grade Report.
A status message indicates that the grading process is in progress. This process can take some time to complete, but you can navigate away from this page and do other work while it runs.
To check the progress of the grading process, reload the page in your browser and scroll down to the Pending Tasks section. The status of active tasks is shown in the table.
When the report is complete, a linked .csv file name becomes available above the Pending Tasks section. File names are in the format {course_id}_grade_report_{datetime}.csv. The most recently generated reports appear at the top of the list.
To open or save a grade report file, locate and select the link for the grade report you requested.
You can open .csv files in a spreadsheet application to sort, graph, and compare data.

To prevent the accidental distribution of learner data, you can download grade report files only by selecting the links on this page. Do not copy these links for reuse elsewhere, as they expire within 5 minutes. The links on this page also expire if the page is open for more than 5 minutes. If necessary, refresh the page to generate new links.

Interpreting the Grade Report

A grade report for your course is a time-stamped .csv file that identifies each learner by ID, email address, and username, and provides a snapshot of their cumulative course scores.
Scores in the grade report are presented by assignment. There is a column for every assignment that is included in your grading configuration: each homework, lab, midterm, final, and any other assignment type you added to your course.

The grade report does not include information about individual problems within assignments, or include learner answer distributions.

The report indicates the enrollment track for each learner. For professional and verified track learners it also shows whether they have verified their identity. The report shows whether each learner is eligible to receive a certificate (determined by whether he has earned a passing grade at the time the report was requested), whether a certificate has been generated, and the type of certificate earned.

If your course includes cohorts, content experiments, or teams, the grade report includes additional columns indicating the name of the cohort, experiment group, or team that each learner belongs to.

The grade report .csv file contains one row of data for each learner and columns that provide the following information.

Learner identifiers, including an internal Student ID, Email address, and Username.
The overall Grade, with the total score a learner has currently attained in the course. This value is expressed as a decimal: a learner with a grade of 0.65 has earned 65% of the credit in the course, and a learner with a grade of 1 has earned 100%.
Each {assignment type} {number} defined in your grading configuration, with the score that the learner attained for that specific assignment. For example, column Homework 3 shows the scores for the third homework assignment. If the learner did not attempt the assignment, the value is “Not Attempted”. If the assignment was not available for the learner, the value is “Not Available”.
An {assignment type} (Avg) with each learner’s current average score for that assignment type: for example, “Homework (Avg)”. This column is not included if a particular assignment type has only one assignment.
This assignment type average takes both dropped assignments and the assignment weight into account. For example, if the course includes five homework assignments and the course grading policy allows one homework assignment with the lowest score to be dropped, the homework assignment average in this grade report is calculated over four homework assignments rather than five. This average is then multiplied by the assignment weight to calculate the assignment type average.
If cohorts are used in the course, a Cohort Name column indicates the name of the cohort that each learner belongs to, including the default cohort. The column is empty for learners who are not yet assigned to a cohort.
If content experiments are used in the course, an Experiment Group column indicates the name of the experiment group that each learner belongs to within a group configuration. The column heading includes the name of the group configuration. The column is empty for learners who are not assigned to an experimental group. If you have more than one experiment group configuration in your course, you see one column for each group configuration.
If teams are enabled in the course, a Team Name column indicates the name of the team that each learner belongs to. The column is empty for learners who have not joined a team.
The Enrollment Track column indicates whether each learner is enrolled in the course in the honor code, verified, or professional education track.
The Verification Status column indicates whether learners who are enrolled in course tracks that require ID verification have successfully verified their identities to edX by submitting an official photo ID via webcam. The value in this column is “N/A” for learners enrolled in course tracks that do not require ID verification, such as “Audit”.
A value of “Not ID Verified” in this column indicates that the learner is enrolled in a course mode that requires ID verification, such as “Verified”, but she has not attempted ID verification, or her ID verification has failed or expired. A value of “ID Verified” indicates that the learner is enrolled in a course mode that requires ID verification, and her ID verification is current and valid.
The Certificate Eligible column indicates whether a learner is eligible for a certificate for your course.
- The value in this column is “Y” for the following learners.
- Verified learners who attained a passing grade before this report was requested. For example, the learner could have earned a passing grade in an earlier session, or run, of the course.
- All whitelisted learners, regardless of grade or enrollment track.
- The value is “N” for the following learners.
- Learners who did not attain a passing grade.
Learners who are on the audit track.
Learners who live in embargoed countries.
For learners who are eligible to receive a certificate, the Certificate Delivered column has a value of “Y” when the certificates for a course have been generated. The value is “N” for learners who are not eligible to receive a certificate.
The Certificate Type column indicates the type of certificate that the learner is eligible for, such as “honor” or “verified”. If a learner is not eligible for a certificate, or if the certificates for a course have not yet been generated, the value in this column is “N/A”.
The Enrollment Status column indicates whether the learner is currently enrolled or unenrolled in the course.

Review Learner Grades on the Instructor Dashboard

You can review a guidebook for a course on the instructor dashboard. To review grades for a course, follow these steps.

View the live version of your course.
Click Instructor, and then select Student Admin.
Click View Gradebook. Grades are calculated and the Gradebook displays.

The gradebook displays a table, with a row for each learner enrolled in the course, listed by user name, and a column for each assignment in the course. The gradebook includes the following features.

You can choose whether to view grades as a percent, from 0% to 100%, or as an absolute score (for example, 10 out of 14).
You can filter the columns displayed in the gradebook by assignment type.
You can filter the learners displayed in the gradebook by enrollment type (for example, verified, audit, or all learners) or by cohort.
You can search for individual learners by their username, using the search field. Searches are case-insensitive.

View a Specific Learner’s Progress Page

To view a specific learner’s Progress page, you need their email address or username. You can check the progress for learners who are either enrolled in or who have unenrolled from, the course.

Learners can view their progress chart and assignment scores when they are logged in to the course.

To view the Progress page for a specific learner, follow these steps.

View the live version of your course.
Next to View this course as, select Specific student.
In the Username or email field that appears, enter the learner’s username or email address, and then press the Enter key on your keyboard.
Select the Progress page.

The Progress page for the learner displays a chart with the grade for each homework, lab, midterm, final, and any other assignment type in your course, and the total grade earned for the course to date.

Understanding the Progress Page

The Progress page for each learner displays a chart that summarizes her progress through the course, with entries for each graded assignment, the average score by assignment type, the total percentage earned in the course so far, and the percentage grade needed for each grade cutoff. This chart is essentially a graphical representation of the data in the problem grade report. However, the chart does not reflect any cohort or experiment group assignments.

The chart’s y-axis shows the range of grade percentages from 0 to 100% and includes labels for the grade ranges defined for the course. For example, if a course is a pass/fail course with a grade of 60% required to pass, the y-axis displays a label “Pass” at the 60% level. If a course has grade levels “A”, “B”, and “C” defined at 90%, 70%, and 50% respectively, the y-axis displays labels at each of those levels.

The learner’s scores for each graded assignment in the course are listed along the x-axis, with the height of each bar indicating the percentage score for that assignment. Assignments are grouped by assignment type, rather than being listed in order of occurrence in the course. A bar for the average of each assignment type is included, as well as a bar for the total cumulative grade that the learner has earned to date in the course.

To learn more about a particular assignment, move the cursor onto the value in the chart. A brief description displays. A dropped assignment is indicated in the chart by an x above the horizontal axis.

Below the chart on the Progress page is a list of all the subsections in the course, with the learner’s scores for the problems in each subsection. Point scores from graded sections are labeled as “Problem Scores”, while point scores from ungraded sections are called “Practice Scores”.

Learner scores on the Progress page are a snapshot of the scores that were calculated when learners submitted answers to the problems. The scores displayed on the Progress page may be different from scores that would be obtained if you recalculated them today if changes were made to the problems.

For example, if the course team changes a released problem’s total possible points, learners who submitted answers to the problem before the change will have grades on the Progress page that do not reflect the problem’s new number of total possible points. This asynchronicity will remain until either the course team rescores the changed problem, or until affected learners resubmit responses to the changed problem.