Option 1: Grant Extra Points on an Existing Assignment

If you want to give a student extra credit on a specific assignment, you can enter a score in the gradebook for the specific assignment that is higher than the max score you set for the assignment. The cell will turn yellow to show you that you included extra credit on the assignment and the higher score will be used when the student’s course average is calculated.

In the past the gradebook prevented teachers from entering a score higher than the defined max score, but we changed this functionality based on teacher feedback. Now you can enter a higher score than the max, but we turn the cell yellow so that you know it’s higher and can confirm that it’s meant to be extra credit and isn’t a mistake. 

Option 2: Create an Extra Credit Assignment

If you want to give students an extra credit assignment, it gets a bit more complicated because graded assignments must all be associated with grade categories. Grade categories each have a weighting and that weighting is used to calculate a final course average. You could create a separate grade category in the gradebook for extra credit or you could add an extra credit assignment to an existing grade category, but it’s important to note that the score on an extra credit assignment can have a very big or a very small impact on the final course average depending on the weighting of its associated grade category.

Option 3: Add Whole Points to Student's Final Report Card Grade

Many schools allow teachers to override the system-calculated class grade that will be on the student's report card ("override" is a feature that can be enabled or disabled by school administrators). If your school permits system-calculated grade override, you can tack additional points onto the student's report card grade when you do the "Mark Grades" workflow at the end of the marking period to prepare for report card generation.

We do not currently have a means of tracking this type of extra credit points throughout the marking period, so teachers who want to do this need to remember which students should get points and how many points. In the mark grades workflow you will be able to tell that points have been added onto the system-calculated grade because the cell will turn yellow in the interface if the system-calculated grade has been overridden.

If you are interested in giving extra credit in this way, ask your administrator if report card grade "override" is enabled in your school's system. 

Option 4: Other

If none of the above approaches appeal to you and you have a different extra credit scenario in mind but are unsure of how to model/configure it in the SchoolFront system, the SchoolFront Support Team (support@schoolfront.com) would be happy to advise you on an appropriate approach. If you want advice on how to create an extra credit assignment, we need to know specific information about the intent of the extra credit from a calculation standpoint:

• How much extra credit do you intend to give?
• How much impact do you want the extra credit to have on the students’ overall course averages?
• Provide some example scenarios and the associated calculations so that we understand how you yourself would calculate the students’ final course scores with the extra credit assignments if you were going to do this outside of SchoolFront.

If you provide this information to the Support Team then they can typically tell you how to do what you want in SchoolFront.