Grades and homework

This is the continuous half of assessment, used all term rather than at a fixed point in the year. A teacher creates an Assessment against one class and one subject with a type, a date, a maximum mark and an optional weightage, then enters a mark per student. Marks carry a status of PRESENT, ABSENT or EXEMPT, which matters later: an exempt student is left out of totals altogether, while an absent one counts as a fail on the report card.

The formal examinations module is a different thing and is documented separately. The two meet at exactly one point: publishing an exam paper creates a published assessment titled with an Exam prefix, dated on the paper’s scheduled start and seeded with a mark row for every active student. From then on that exam result is an ordinary gradebook row and rolls up like any other.

Prerequisites

• An active academic year, since teacher assignments are scoped to it.
• Active teacher assignments per class-subject at /teachers/assignments - without one, a teacher cannot create an assessment or set homework for that pair.
• A grading scale at /settings/grading-scale if you want letter grades and a pass threshold rather than raw percentages.
• Classes with active student memberships, which supply the mark-entry roster.

Gradebook

• /grades opens with Assessments and mark entry, plus Gradebook, Consolidation, Analytics and Report cards tabs.
• Assessment types cover unit test, assignment, mid term, final, term one to four, pre-board, project, practical and other.
• An assessment stays DRAFT until published; only PUBLISHED assessments reach students, parents, the class gradebook and report cards.
• The class gradebook has two modes: the latest published assessment per subject, or a weighted master view that combines every published assessment using its weightage.
• Class-wide views are limited to class and co-class teachers plus leadership; a subject teacher sees only their own class-subject pairs.
• Students read /my-grades and parents /parent-dashboard/grades?childId=, both filtered to published rows.

Homework

• Teachers create homework at /assignments with a title, class, subject, due date and optional maximum marks and attachments.
• Homework is unpublished by default; publish it so students can see it.
• Students submit text or files against the assignment; a submission tracks not submitted, submitted, graded or late.
• Teachers grade with marks and written feedback, both visible on the student view.
• Parents are redirected to /parent-dashboard/homework rather than the staff screen.
• Due reminders only fire if the school cron is wired; without it nothing is sent automatically.

Who can do what

What breaks if you skip a step

• Assessment left in draft: it is invisible to families and excluded from the class gradebook and from report card totals, so publish readiness reports the subject as missing.
• No weightage set: the weighted master gradebook has nothing to weight by and that assessment contributes zero to the combined view.
• Teacher assignment inactive or belonging to a previous year: mark entry is refused with a message that the teacher is not assigned to that class or subject.
• Grading scale changed mid-term: every unpublished card and live view recomputes letters against the new bands immediately.

Handoff and limits

The gradebook hands off to report cards, which aggregate published assessments dated inside a term, and to analytics. Examinations hand into the gradebook rather than out of it. Nothing here writes attendance: the attendance figure printed on a report card is read from the daily register, not from mark statuses.

• There is no per-question mark scheme in the ordinary gradebook; question-level breakdowns exist only on the examinations side.
• Late homework is flagged but no penalty is applied automatically.
• Plagiarism fields exist on a submission but no detection service is integrated - a score has to be recorded by hand.