1. The Grades are Not Calculated Until Late Monday Morning Hawaii Time (or late afternoon East Coast time): Late Monday morning (Hawaii time), we run the grade calculator to determine each student's grade for the project. Knowing that this process is very important to students we take extra caution. That is the reason for the slight delay in distributing the grades. We double check everything to insure they are no errors.

Until the grades are calculated and distributed, if students look on their Op-Eds for a grade they will see a 0%. All that means is that the grades have not been calculated yet – not that they got a low grade.

2. Looking at the Winning Op-Eds: If you want to see the winning Op-Eds (and if anyone from your school won), simply go to MY ACTION PERIODS, click on the appropriate Action Period and then near the bottom of the page, next to WINNING OP-EDS, click on VIEW. You can see the names of the winners and the number of supporting signatures for each Op-Ed. To see the actual Op-Ed, click on the student’s name. Please Note: Students CANNOT see which schools the winning Op-Eds are from. We previously included the school as well as the student’s name. But we discovered some students were supported Op-Eds from their schools – without reading them – and ignoring Op-Eds from other schools. Now students have to judge whether they support an Op-Ed or not based on the Op-Ed’s content.

3. The Grades and Grading: Students ill automatically receive a grade – expressed as a percentage -- for the assignment. Students can see the grade by clicking on a highlighted link.

You can obtain what percentage (or grade) each student got from the Teacher’s dashboard by going to MY ACTION PERIODS, clicking on the Action Period listed, and then clicking on MY STUDENTS, VIEW. The Teacher can then arrange all the students’ grades by NAME or by GRADE. The grades are already listed alphabetically by name, so to get a print out of the grades organized alphabetically by name, simply click on PRINT. To list the grades by percentage from high to low (or vice-versa), go to the AVERAGE GRADE link at the top of the page and you will see a slightly shadowed triangle pointing up and a slightly shadowed triangle pointing down. Chose the one you want and then click on PRINT. (The reason you might do this is so that you can set the cut off points you wish for an A, an A-, B+, etc and need to see how many students might be above and below the cut-off line for a particular grade.) If you do this and then want to go back to organizing the list ALPHABETICALLY, you can click on RESET LIST.

You can print these scores out if you wish by clicking on PRINT LIST.

If you want to see your STUDENTS’ PAPERS PLUS THEIR GRADES, please log in to your personal home page and, on the left, click on MY CLASSES and then click on your class. The next page, at the bottom, reads TOTAL OP-EDS WRITTEN (with a number). Just to the right of this, in parentheses, is PRINT ALL: CONTINUOUS PAGE BREAK. Continuous refers to printing students continuously (in order to save paper); Page Break refers to each student’s paper starting on a new page (so you can easily separate out one student’s paper from another).

Finally, if you want to see ALL THE DETAILS OF WHAT A PARTICULAR STUDENT GOT ON HIS OR HER PAPER – how the student did on each of the writing criteria used in evaluating the student’s paper, you click on MY STUDENTS, LIST ALL or SEARCH. (depending on how you wish to find the student). When you come to the student’s page, you will see near the bottom, OP-EDS WRITTEN: 1 (VIEW). Click on VIEW and then click on the Action Period. This will bring you to the student’s Op-Ed. Click on PRINT OP-ED. This will bring up all the specifics of the student’s grade. If you want to actually print the Op-Ed out, click PRINT NOW.

4. Printing Out Your Students’ Op-Eds and Grades: Teachers can print out all the Op-Eds with their grades by going, on their dashboards, to MY CLASSES, clicking on the specific class, and then under TOTAL OP-EDS WRITTEN, PRINT ALL. The Teacher can click on CONTINUOUS (so the Op-Eds follow one another on the same page) or PAGE BREAK (so that each Op-Ed is separated from the others by a page break). TAs can read any Op-Ed they wish by clicking on the student’s name and then under OP-EDS WRITTEN, click on VIEW.

TA's cannot print out the this material from their own web sites. Only teachers can print them out.) Teachers can, if they wish, can print out the Op-Eds for their TAs with each Op-Ed on a separate page, by clicking on TOTAL OP-EDS WRITTEN, PRINT ALL, and clicking on PAGE BREAK, so that TAs can have a copy of the Op-Eds written by the students’ in their sections.

5. Dealing With Students Upset With Their Grades: If a student wishes to protest the grade received, there is a simple solution. Indicate that the student needs to write a 100 paragraph explaining why he or she views the grade received was inappropriate. This is critical – so students simply do not vent. Then, with this paragraph in hand, you can regrade the paper. The student should understand, before asking you to regrade the paper, that you might regrade it UP or DOWN. (There is no guarantee that regrading a paper will improve the paper’s score.) Usually less than 2% of the students in a class select this option.

6. What The TA’s Can See and Print: TAs can read any Op-Ed they wish by clicking on the student’s name and then under OP-EDS WRITTEN, click on VIEW and then, if they wish, PRINT. As noted above, TA's cannot print out all the Op-Eds in their class section. To do this, they need to log into their teacher's website and follow the steps listed under # 4 above.