Adding Calculated Columns to the My Grades Tool

The My Grades tool in WebCT has the capability to make calculations for you. You may decide to use this capability to adjust an exam score using a curve. You may use the calculated column to determine a student's average for the course. There are numerous possibilities, which are limited only by your grading schemes. We will go through an example of how to calculate an average for the course.
  1. Go to the Expanded Control Panel, click on Manage Students under the Manage Course column.
    Click on manage students
  2. You will be presented with a list of students and pre-existing grade columns for any WebCT Quizzes and Assignments you may have already set up for your course. This example has one Exam, one Quiz and one Assignment. WebCT can automatically provide a score for Quizzes or you may override that and enter or adjust the quiz score manually (see that section of this tutorial for more details), Assignment grades are usually entered manually by you or your TA. We will create a column to average the Exam, Quiz, and Assignment columns.
    Manage Students Page
  3. In this tutorial, we will first add a column for the calculated average scores. Click the drop-down box under Organize and select Manage columns. Then click the Go button for Organize.
    Manage Columns
  4. From the Manage Columns Actions area, click Add Column.
    Click Add Column
  5. Type in the label for the column, select the type column, and click on Add. In this example, we want a column in which we will use to make a calculation of the students' average course score, based on the scores in the other columns.
    Add the column
  6. The column has now been added to your gradebook. Notice the properties are set to visible and calculated. You may change these values after creating the column. For example, you may want to align the scores to center them in the column.
    Column Parameters
  7. You may change values after creating the column by clicking in the checkbox for that column and selecting your desired parameter changes from the drop-down boxes in the Options section.
    Edit Column Parameters
  8. To enter the formula for your calculated column, click the checkbox above the column name and then click on the Setup Column button.
    Setup Column
  9. Now use the Calculation Editor to input your formula. Since you are using numerical data in the columns, your formula is expressed in terms of the column names and you can only calculate numeric data-type columns. In this example, click on the Function drop-down box and select sum, then click on the Start list button. The initial part of your formula will be inserted into the Formula text area.
    Edit Column Parameters
  10. To begin entering the columns that you wish to sum, click on the Column drop-down box, select first column, then click the Insert button.
    Insert Column
  11. Now click on the Next item button to insert a comma in your formula.
    insert commas between the columns in a list
  12. And follow the comma with the next column by repeating the previous step of selecting the appropriate column from the Column drop-down box and clicking the Insert button.
    add the next column
  13. Repeat the previous steps as necessary to select and insert all of the columns you wish to include in your calculation formula. Remember to insert a comma between the columns in the list by clicking the Next item button after each column insert. When you are done, close out the formula brackets by clicking the End list button.
    repeat as necessary
  14. Finally, to finish our average calculation formula we want to divide our three columns by three, so click on "/" and "3" on the numeric keypad. Click the Update button to commit the changes.
    Update
  15. To see the final result of the calculations, select Control Panel, Manage Course, Manage Students (in that order). You should see a screen similar to the one shown. You can see that, for each student, our calculated column now reflects the average of the other columns.
    Result
  16. Please review the instructions on how to create the other column types.