Setting Up New Infinite Campus Assignment Tool

This guide is intended to be the basic information you will need to be able to set up the new Infinite Campus grading system.

  • The key difference you will note is there is NO Lesson Planner.
  • What used to be called “Task Groups” in the lesson planner are now called “Categories.”
  • You set up all of your preferences and categories through a tool called “Assignments.”
  • The Daily Planner is a new feature that will easily show you your assignments and which kids are absent on which days.
  • You will likely now not use your grade book to records assignments. You will likely find the new Assignments tool easier to utilize for entering grades.

This first section is a step by step guide to the bare minimum of setting up the grade book. This will show you how to set up your new categories, assign weights if needed, and be ready to add assignments so parents will see grades on the portal. Another document will be provided to give all details of all new features.

  1. Log in to Infinite Campus using your account. You will still see all your courses and sections that you teach in the drop down menu at the top of the screen. You will NOT see a lesson planner tool in the list of tools in the index tab.
  1. Select a section from the drop down that you know that you have students’ rostered into.
  1. Click on “assignments” in the index tab on the left side of your screen.

PREFERENCES

  1. At the top of the assignment screen there are several options. First, click on “edit teacher preferences.” This is where you will set all of your class preferences for your sections. For example, here you can choose to hide the “dropped” students from your book. Except at High School, you should choose your default grading task to be the “6 weeks grade.” When you have chosen the preferences you want make sure to click on “Mass Assign to Multiple Sections” and choose the other sections that you want these preferences to apply to. When done, click saves on the top of the screen to save all preferences.

(High School Note:When you are setting up your preferences, start with a section that is a semester long section in your drop down menu. (Remember to look for section numbers 50 or above.) Choose the preferences you want such as “hide dropped students” and choose the default grading task of “semester term grades.” When you click on the “mass assign to other sections” link, all the other sections you teach will come up. ONLY choose those sections that are semester long courses so the default grading task is correct on those sections. When done with the semester long course, choose a year long course in your drop down and set up your preferences and choose “6 weeks grade” as your default grading task. Then, mass assign and carefully choose the year long sections.)

  1. When done with preferences, click on “Return to Assignments List” at the top of the page.

GRADING TASK CALCULATIONS

  1. Click on “Edit Grade Calc Options” at the top of the screen. This is where you will set up the grading scale for each section as well as whether or not you will use weighting. You will do this for each section individually, but you will complete it at the beginning of the year for the entire year. To set it up:
  • Use the drop down on the top right of the screen and choose “District Grading Scale”
  • If you weight your categories (ie. Classwork, homework, tests, etc.) then you have to checkmark the “weight categories” box. You do not need to check the box by “Use Score’s % Value.”
  • Click on “Fill All” and the District Grading scale will go in all the 6 weeks grading tasks below.
  • You then must go to the grading task below called “Final Grading Task” and select the “A-F” grading scale. The Final Grading Task must have the A-F scale chosen or it will not calculate on report cards correctly.”

(High School Note: This is another area that you have to be careful what you are picking due to the semester long courses and yearlong courses. If you are working in a section that is a semester long course, you will only need to place the “District Grading Scale” in the “Semester Term Grade” tasks. You should choose the “No Calculation” button for the 6 weeks grading tasks if you see them. You will need to place the A-F scale in the “Semester Final Grade” task and again choose “no calculation” on the “final grade” task of a semester course. Depending on how the grading tasks had to be set up depends on what you will see. Just match the grading scale with the correct task and you will be fine.)

(Elementary Note: You will choose the “Writing Grading Scale” for the 6 weeks grades and final grades of your writing class.)

  • Repeat these steps to set up categories in all sections you teach that you couldn’t mass assign.

CATEGORIES

  1. After all grading calculation options have been set up, you will next create your “categories.” These were called “task groups” in the old lesson planner. Categories are like departments that you will put your grades in so you, students, and parents know what type of assignment something is. You may have categories such as “Classwork, Homework, Participation, Tests.” You can choose your own categories. To set up categories:
  • Click on “Edit Categories” at the top of the assignments screen.
  • Click on “Create Category”
  • Type in the Name of your category- ie. “Homework”
  • Type in the weight of the category if you use weights.

***If you choose to weight the categories, please choose carefully. If you weight something like tests at 50% of your grade and you only have one or two tests in a term, it can seriously hurt student’s grades and may not be beneficial. This is especially true at the high school now with semester long courses. Student grades will be an average of 3 grading terms for semester courses instead of 6, so if you plan to weight grades please make sure you have a solid purpose for doing so. Don’t do it just because you always have. (REMEMBER: The total for all your categories in weighting must equal 100%)

  • All the sections for a particular course that you teach will appear in the part labeled sections. You need to checkmark all the sections that get the particular category you are working with.

(HIGH SCHOOL NOTE:If you teach sections of the same course, ie. AP English 3 and some sections are yearlong and some are semester long, you will once again need to carefully choose the sections. ONLY choose the sections that meet the same time frame as the section you have selected in the drop down menu. This is very important for the next step of choosing grading tasks.)

  • Select the grading task for the sections you are assigning the category to. For most everyone in the district, this will be the “6 weeks grade” task. You DO NOT want to assign the category to the “Final Grade.” A final grade is just an accumulation of all the term grades and does not require any categories.

(HIGH SCHOOL NOTE: This is why you want to do semester courses and yearlong courses separately. If you are setting up a category in a yearlong class, choose the “6 weeks grades” task. If you are setting up a category in a semester course, choose the “semester term grades.” If you choose these correctly, you won’t enter grades in the wrong grading task.)

  • If you want to drop the lowest score in a category from counting in the grade, select the “drop lowest score” checkbox. This is different in the new program. You can check this box any time throughout a grading term and don’t have to make sure you have it checked prior to entering any grades. If you check it in the middle of a term as soon as you enter a new grade it will drop the lowest score from that category.
  • Make sure to click “Save Category” at the top of the screen. (Note: you can choose save and score if you want to save the category and then put an assignment in, but since we are setting up categories for the year you won’t have to do that now. However, if you do an assignment in the middle of a term and want to add a new category, you can add the category and then go directly to score the assignment.)
  • Finish creating categories for all your courses by starting over the category steps over..

When you are done you will be ready to enter assignments for the year. Infinite Campus has a fairly comprehensive document on managing assignments. What you will want to remember as you review the material for assignments is:

  • When creating an assignment, you get an assignment editor screen. This screen allows you to easily select more than one section of the same course that you teach to apply the assignment to. You can not apply an assignment to a different course- only to sections within the same course.
  • The assignment name is seen on the portal.
  • Assignment description, objectives, and references can be entered for each assignment by clicking on the “Show Description, Objective, and References Fields.” You do not currently have to do this for each assignment. If you do put something in the fields, it will show on the portal.
  • You can put in an assignment to show up on the portal that WON’T count in a grade by unchecking the “Active” checkbox. In order for an assignment to count, “active” must be checked.
  • If you want to hide an assignment from the portal, you can check hide. However, parents like to see the assignments that factor into a child’s grade.
  • Creating student groups is done in the “student group” tool. At present time, you can only select one student group for an assignment, so it may be better to assign an assignment to the whole class and then check “exempt” for students who don’t do the assignment.
  • You will see all your assignments in a list. You can sort that list by the categories you created.
  • The only date field that is required in assignments is the “Due” date. If you put an assigned date and due date it will show up in the “Daily Planner” from the date of assignment until the date due.
  • You need to try to enter the due date for an assignment on the real date the assignment was due and not on the day you finally get to enter it in the grade book. The assignment entry screen will show the kids that were absent on the date that you put in for due date. It is also important for parent communication that parents understand when an assignment was due.
  • After you enter an assignment in the assignment editor screen, you can choose to “Save” it or “Save and Score” If you “save and score” you will be directed to a new screen that allows you to easily enter all the grades. It is similar to the grade book, but you don’t have to wait on a JAVA editor to come up and it is a larger screen. You can easily fill all grades with the same score, fill in some grades and then fill in all the empty fields with the same score, or score each individually. There is a nice large box to type comments directly attached to student if you want to create a comment on a particular assignment. This is really the easiest place to enter grades now.
  • In addition to the checkboxes that you had last year for “Missing assignments, late assignments, cheated, etc.” there is a new checkbox for “turned in.” Many times a student turns in an assignment but you haven’t had a chance to grade it yet. You can mark it “turned in” so parents will see on the portal and will wait a little bit for a grade instead of thinking the assignment is missing.
  • IF you set up an assignment and checkmark it to go out to several sections at once and then you go back to edit that assignment, the things you edit will apply to ALL of the sections. This is good if you marked the wrong point value or something in the beginning. HOWEVER, if you need to delete an assignment out of one section for some reason, DON’T do it unless you want to delete it out of ALL sections. Hitting delete will delete everything about the assignment including scores you entered. If you just want to take it out of one section, click to edit the assignment and then take the checkbox off the section you don’t want the assignment in.
  • When you are done entering scores for an assignment, make sure to click “Save.”
  • There is a new “Validating Assignments” process that has to be completed for various situations. This doesn’t happen very often and will be described in Infinite Campus documentation pretty thoroughly.
  • If you liked the “Tree” view of assignments in categories, you can toggle to a “tree view” by using the button at the top of the assignment list screen.

Sign up for a Campus Community account by clicking on the “Campus Community” icon in the index tab. Here you will be able to get further documentation and watch videos of the new teacher tools as well as learn about other areas of Infinite Campus.