Quick grade entry at the University of Illinois

Overview

For classes with more than 20 students, entering grades into UIs Banner grade system (aka UI Enterprise Self-Service) can be tedious. Here's a Firefox add-on that makes this much easier:

For security reasons, Firefox may not automatically recognize this file as an add-on. In this case, once you've saved it as "uiquickgrade.xpi", open it in Firefox via the menu item File->Open File.

Detailed instuctions

For general information about grades at the UI see the Registar, including specifics on final grade entry. Here's a fake grade entry page if you want to experiment outside of Banner itself.

  1. In Firefox navigate to the Final Grade Entry page for your class in Banner. Then choose the Firefox menu item "Tools -> UI Quick Grade Entry". The following window should appear:

  2. In the UI Quick Grade window, select your Banner window in the "Target Window" drop-down menu.

  3. Copy your grades into the "Grades to enter" box, in any format where the grades are at the end of each line. The grades must be in the same order as the students appear in Banner. It doesn't matter what else is on each line, as long as you use the allowed grades: None, A, A+, A-, ABS, B, B+, B-, C, C+, C-, D, D+, D-, F, W. (Honors learning agreement grades like A-H are also permitted.) Also you must enter the data for your entire class into the tool at once; however, in Step 4 you will send them to Banner in the usual 50-student chunks.

    If you keep your grades in a spreadsheet, you can simply select the column of grades and copy-paste into the box. You could also create a plain text file with your scores, e.g. by exporting a spreadsheet as "tab-delimited text" (.txt) or "comma-separated-value" (.csv). Math folks who use that department's grading system should see here.

  4. Now click "Enter grades" to set all the grade menus currently displayed to their desired values. Save your grades in Banner with the "Submit" button as usual, and then navigate to the next screen of 50 students and hit "Enter grades" again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  5. Check and make sure the total number of students printed in the "Messages" box at matches what's in Banner. If it's off, a common cause is having a student getting a W who is listed on Banner but not in your gradebook. Add these students to your own list and go back to Step 3.
  6. Print your grades off Banner and double-check by hand that everything was entered correctly!

This program is a public service of Nathan Dunfield. It is derived from the Execute JS add-on.

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