Introduction
Planning a markbook
SM-Marks Online organises students and results in a particular way. The way students are organised into markbooks is designed to simplify the keeping and updating of results while providing flexibility when manipulating the results.
By understanding the approach used by SM-Marks Online you can plan and organise your information to take full advantage of the different SM-Marks Online commands.
The markbook approach
The general idea behind SM-Marks Online is to store only related classes in the same markbook. SM-Marks Online stores each markbook separately. Each markbook contains a list of classes that store students and their results in a series of tasks. There is no limit to the number of different markbook that SM-Marks Online can handle.
A markbook should only contain classes that store related results. This is because all the classes in a markbook share the same tasks for storing results.
With SM-Marks Online you work with only one markbook at a time. All the commands that operate on results, such as weighting and ranking students only affect the open markbook.
Example
You should place related classes in a single markbook. Here related means the classes that share common exams and assessment procedures. For example, in a faculty there could be a one markbook file for year 7, another markbook for year 8, year 9 and so on. The year 7 markbook stores all the year 7 classes, the year 8 markbook all the year 8 classes and so on.
Arranging tasks
In each markbook the tasks used for storing results are the same across all the classes in the markbook. This is why only related classes should be stored in a markbook.
A markbook can have up to 200 tasks for results. The large number of tasks means that, if necessary, it is possible to make some tasks that are intended for use by only a single class in the markbook.
This is sometimes needed when classes in a year have individual class assessments that are not directly related to the whole year. By making some tasks and setting aside the use of those tasks for only one class you can operate on the results without the concern of affecting results in the other classes.