Can I set up negative points for attendance?

Question

Hello,

I am wanting to set up a way to create negative points for attendance. Students will not earn any points for attending class, but they will lose points for being absent. The points lost will come from the final grade total.

Could I get a walk-through on how to set this up?

Jennifer.W.973 · Answer

@Kourtnie.H.217 If you want to deduct points but not change the total points for the course, you can either use a bonus grade item or you can use a regular grade item and set the maximum points to 0.01. The bonus item will make it easiest to display just the negative points without a denominator, but you cannot remove the bonus label which might be a little confusing.

A regular grade item will show the denominator and depending on your other grades and if your gradebook is set to treated ungraded as 0, rounding could possibly be an issue due to the .01 denominator. I'd also recommend turning off the grade scheme for either the bonus or regular item and showing 0 decimal points so students don't even see the .01 points. (In the following example, the gradebook is set to exclude ungraded items.)

Subul.I.322 · Answer

Hi @Kourtnie.H.217, thank you for reaching out to the Brightspace Community!

You can set up a Quiz (Present today? True/False) for each of your class session. You can then associate a grade item to give/take away attendance points.

I also found a discussion thread which might be relevant and helpful:

https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/discussion/5993/i-set-up-attendance-for-my-course-sections-is-there-a-way-to-automate-the-attendance-process

Hope this helps!