Grading in Google Classroom

As a teacher, you have the choice to grade students’ work within Google Classroom. You also have the choice to not assign grades to your Google Classroom content. It’s genuinely flexible in that regard.

If you are planning to grade assignments in Google Classroom, you must post them as an assignment. Posting materials does not offer the opportunity to issue a score, where assignments do. Google’s default value for an assignment is /100, but . you can change that to be any number you want. Sometimes you may have to use your imagination a bit. If you wanted to grade something as “done or not done”, you might score it /1, with 1 being a completed task and 0 being an incomplete task.

If you choose to grade assignments in Google Classroom, you can export them as a spreadsheet from time to time to check in on the students’ averages. In order for this to be viable, you also need to be aware that you control the “weighting” of assignments by their “out of” score. An assignment /100 is worth ten times as much as an assignment /10.

When you grade using Google Classroom, you “return” the assignments meaning the grade is emailed to the student, or they can click into the assignment on Google Classroom to view their mark. 

Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to using this feature of Google Classroom, and it is your choice to use it or not. Please bear in mind the CESD assessment philosophies and policies as you make your decision regarding this.

If you choose not to issue grades in Google Classroom, it is still a valuable mechanism for offering comments on student work (we will cover how to accomplish this in the next module), and being engaged in the process of learning (via private comments and conversation) as the student is working on the assignment. This is of particular value for longer assignments such as essays or creative writing. If the assignment is a one-day assignment, this would be a time-consuming role for the teacher.