Scholaright is primarily built to help parents track homeschooling records for their own convenience and peace of mind and for families who need to adhere to specific state regulations. This series will help you get started, including setting up your school, students, courses, grades, and then viewing compliance-based reports for grades, attendance, and transcripts. Part 1 will take us as far as entering and viewing grades. Let’s dive in!
Create your school
When you log into Scholaright for the first time, you will be guided to setup your school:
All of these settings can be changed later, so don’t worry if you aren’t 100% certain about what to go with. Fill in a name for your school, which will appear on grade and attendance reports, as well as transcripts. If you educate in a state that requires your school to be registered, we recommend using the same name you registered with.
All of the contact information on this screen is optional, but will also be used on reports and transcripts. Again, this can be changed later, but be sure to use appropriate contact information for how your reports will be used.
Scholaright has provided reasonable GPA rules, associating letter grades with percentages. You can either leave these as-is, or customize them to fit your own needs.
Note that the “Fail threshold” indicates the point at which a course will be considered failed. Any grade at or below this threshold will result in a failure and no credit will be earned. If your program or state has standards for pass/fail and GPA, be sure to use those instead of Scholaright‘s defaults.
Similar to GPA rules, Scholaright provides default terms, which can be customized.
The default terms are designed around a typical US school that has a Fall and Spring semester/term, and two quarters within each semester. Adjust to whatever fits your school’s needs. For example, you may have three terms called Term 1, Term 2, and Term 3, without any quarters.
Once you have everything the way you want, click the Save Changes button.
If you ever need to change these settings, you can click the Gear icon and choose Edit School.
Create your first academic year
All courses live within academic years. Each year, you will want to create a new academic year to manage your courses. You can do this a couple of ways. First, if you don’t have an academic year already, Scholaright will guide you to create one. Alternatively, you can create an academic year by following these steps:
Option 1: Click the Quick Create button and choose Academic Year
Option 2: Click Academic Years on the left and then click + Create Academic Year
You should only need choose a Start and End Date for your academic year and the rest will be filled in by the Academic Term Defaults you chose while creating your school. Click Create Academic Year to finish. Double-check that your new academic year is selected in the top bar:
Create a course
You will use courses to create assignments and manage students’ grades, so courses are the heart of Scholaright. Click the Quick Create button and choose Course.
Enter a Course Title, like U.S. History. Description is optional, but some states require reports to include a description of what is covered in a course. Whatever you enter here will be included in reports.
Grade Level is optional but recommended, especially if you have more than one student taking courses with similar names (e.g.: 3rd grade Math vs 5th grade Math). When you get to high school courses, Grade Level will become important because transcripts will depend on this to construct a high school level list of courses. Don’t worry, you can always change course settings later if you need to.
For Credits, you would typically award .5 credits per term/semester. If your course will run year-round, give it 1 credit; if it is only one term, then give it .5. If your program or state uses different requirements, follow those. Credits will be included in transcripts.
Pass/Fail Course is an option for courses that only provide a Pass/Fail instead of a percentage. This is common with some electives. If you select this option, you will only be able to add a single assignment type called a “Pass/Fail Checkpoint.” If your course needs to be graded with a percentage and letter grade, then do not select this option.
Click Create Course
Add assignments
You should be taken directly into your course after creating it. But, if you need to find it later, you can click the Courses link on the left. If you expand this menu instead, you can click Course List to see all your courses in the currently selected Academic Year.
Once you’ve opened your course, you will see it divided by the terms and quarters you chose. Within each section, you can click + Add Assignment to create an assignment in that term/quarter.
Give the assignment a Title (e.g.: Unit 1 Quiz, Workbook 12052, Book Report 1, etc.), Type, and Max Score. Everything else is optional, such as Due Date. Weight will default to 1, which is fine unless you do want certain assignments, such as tests to have more weight in the final grade for this course.
Click the Create Assignment button.
Repeat this for all the assignments you need to grade. If you have courses and assignments from other systems (including handwritten records) that you want to bring into Scholaright, check out our import features. We will cover this in another post.
Add students
Now, you are ready to setup your students. Students do not live within an academic year, so you only have to create a student once to enroll them into any course in any academic year. Click the Quick Create button and choose Student.
The only required fields here are First and Last Name. If you educate in a state that requires a state-issued ID number, you can enter that in Issued Student ID#. This will show up on reports. If you enter nothing, Scholaright will use its own unique ID number for your students.
You can also search for courses you want to enroll your student in, but this is not the only way to add students to courses.
Click Create Student
Enrolling students in courses
Enrolling students is easy. Simply open your course and click the Enroll Students link under the Assignments list.
Choose the student(s) you want to enroll in the current course and click Save.
Grade assignments
You have a course with assignments and students. Nice work! Now, it’s time to start grading those students’ assignments.
Open the course and click the Grade Assignment button for the assignment you need to enter a score for.
You will see several stats about the assignment, such as average score. Below this, you will see the list of enrolled students, along with a space to enter their score.
A moment after entering a score for a student, you should see a green check mark appear and then fade away. This indicates the score was saved. You can also click Save Scores to be sure.
Once you have entered scores for every student on an assignment, you will see a green Graded button on the Assignments list instead of Grade Assignment. You can still click this button to go in and adjust grades if needed.
View grades
You are just a couple clicks away from seeing your students’ GPAs. You can get there a couple ways:
Option 1: Click Students on the left and then click View Grades.
Option 2: Click Grade Reports on the left and then select the student’s name for whom you wish to view grades.
And there you have it: your school, your first academic year, your courses, assignments, and students. And you even have a handy grade report. Next time, we will get into the quarterly report and transcripts, along with attendance tracking and reporting.
[…] Getting Started: Part 1, we looked at setting up your school, students, courses, and assignments. We also looked briefly at […]