Introduction
Calculations
The way SM-Marks Online organises the student results into a series of rows and tasks with one row for each student and one task for each set of results has implications when doing calculations.
Each task created in a markbook applies to all the students in it. The markbook organises the students into separate classes, and you can view the students as either a single list of all students, or as only the students from a single class.
Regardless of the way the students are viewed, each column is the same task for all the classes in the markbook. This means that when a single class is shown, if the Edit Task command is used to alter either the task name or maximum, the name and maximum are changed for all classes.
This affects how calculations can be done, because each task only stores a single calculation. In practice, this means two different classes in a markbook cannot have a different calculation for a single task.
Suppose a markbook has two or more classes in it, such as 8Q1 and 8Q2. The way SM-Marks Online operates means that in this markbook there are several issues to understand.
A calculation applied to a task can affect any combination of classes. A single class, all the classes, or some combination in the middle.
When a task has a calculation, there cannot be a second calculation applied to the same task, even if the second calculation applies to a different set of classes.
If a task has a calculation that applies to only 8Q1, and then later the same task has the calculation changed to apply to only 8Q2, the results in 8Q1 remain but are no longer "live". This means that the results in the task of 8Q1 will no longer be updated if the raw scores are changed.
If a course has different examination papers with different raw maximums for 8Q1 and 8Q2, the raw results cannot share a single task, because of the different maximums.
If students needed to be ranked, or graded, as a group then they should be stored in a single markbook, although they can still be organised as separate classes within the markbook.
If a markbook must store classes that have different tests and assessments, then generally different tasks should be set aside for the different classes and the raw scores.
In this previous case, SM-Marks Online does not enforce the use of particular tasks for only certain classes. The tasks should be set aside by following some convention that can be easily followed, e.g. arrange and move all the tasks for a particular class together, or name the tasks so it is clear what they are for.