Assessment Skills

Note: If your school has enabled the new faculty grade entry experience, you will have access to both Assessment skills and New assessment skills in Academics, Grades, Grading setup. For more information, see Activate New Features.

Assessment skills are qualitative phrases that describe a measurement of student performance. Assessment skills are what Assessment grade plans rely on to determine what skills are associated with courses.

The Assessment skills list contains all assessment skills across all grade plan groups. Assessment skills are reusable, and each instance of an assessment skill is represented in the Grade plan groups column. The Type column is populated based on the Group that the assessment skill is added to within a grade plan.

To get started:

  1. From the persona menu, select Academics.

  2. Select Grades, then select Grading setup.

  3. Choose Assessment skills.

Tip: For a tutorial on setting up grading at your school, see The Guide to Grading Setup.

  1. Select the plus button (+) to create a new skill.

  2. Enter a Description (for example, "Counting by fours," "Shares with others," "Contributes to class discussions").

  3. Set the Status to Active.

  4. Select Save & Close or Save & Add Another.

The Assessment skill is now available to be added to an Assessment grade plan within School Year Setup.

To change which information appears on the Assessment skills page, select Columns, make your selections, and then Apply changes.

To narrow down the list, use Filters. You can filter the list by Status and Type. Select Apply filters when you have made your selections.

To download the list of assessment skills as a CSV spreadsheet, select Export. The file will save in your internet browser's download folder.

After a few years of creating and using assessment skills, your school's list might become overly long and difficult to navigate. To help cut down on redundant or outdated entries, you can merge multiple existing assessment skills into a single assessment skill going forward.

  1. Select Clean up entries.

  2. On the left side of the screen, select the assessment skill(s) you would like to replace.

    Tip: Inactive assessment skills will display the label "(Inactive)" in this view.

  3. On the right side of the screen, select the assessment skill you would like to use going forward.

  4. When you are finished, select Save.

Each assessment skill can be set to Active or Inactive status. You can modify the status of assessment skills one at a time or in bulk.

To modify a single assessment skill status:

  1. Select the context menu beside an assessment skill, then select Edit assessment skill.

  2. Change the Status to Active or Inactive.

  3. Select Save & Close.

To modify assessment skill statuses in bulk:

  1. Select Update multiple statuses.

  2. Update status to Inactive or Active.

  3. Inactivate those entries NOT used in the following:

    • In the current [year] and future years

    • In future years only

    • In specific years: select the years to update.

  4. Select Update status.

Assessment skills are qualitative phrases that describe a measurement of student performance. Assessment grade plans reply on assessment skills to determine what skills are associated with courses.

To get started:

  1. From the persona menu, select Academics.

  2. Select Grades, then Grading setup, then New Assessment skills.

The Assessment skills list contains all assessment skills across all grade plan groups. Assessment skills are reusable, and each instance of an assessment skill is represented in the Grade plan group column. The Type column is populated based on the group that the assessment skill is added to within a grade plan.

Mastery skill equivalents

If your school uses Competency Based Education, a mastery skill equivalent can be set up for each of your assessment skills. The mastery skill equivalent can be a transferable skill or sub-skill, or a content-area skill or sub-skill.

While assessment skills can be included on report cards, mastery skills cannot. Setting a mastery skill equivalent for an assessment skill allows the mastery skill rating in a teacher's gradebook to be pulled in as a grade for the corresponding assessment skill so that it can be included on report cards.

  • An assessment skill can only have either a transferable skill equivalent or a content-area skill equivalent, not both.

  • A mastery skill can only be selected as the equivalent for one assessment skill.

  • Both mastery skills and sub-skills are available to be selected as equivalents.

  • If an assessment skill is mapped to a parent transferable skill or parent content-area skill, the sub-skills under the parent are averaged.

Teachers pull their mastery skill ratings from their gradebook into assessment skill grades using the Calculate option in Grading. For more information, see Grading - Teacher Perspective.

Tip: For a tutorial on setting up grading at your school, see The Guide to Grading Setup.

  1. Select New skill.

  2. Enter a Description (for example, "Counting by fours," "Shares with others," "Contributes to class discussions").

  3. New skills default to Active. If you're not ready to use a skill, deselect Active.

  4. Optional: If your school uses Competency Based Education, search for and select a Mastery skill equivalent for this assessment skill.

    Tip: In the search results, skills display Transferable skill or Content-area skill. Sub-skills display Associated transferable skill or Associated content-area skill.

  5. Select Save & Close or Save & Add Another.

  6. The assessment skill is now available to be added to an Assessment grade plan within School Year Setup.

To change the information displayed in the Assessment skills list, select Columns, make your selections, and then Apply changes.

To narrow down the list, select the Filter icon. You can filter the list by Status and Assessment type option. Select Apply filters when you have made your selections.

To download the list of assessment skills as a CSV spreadsheet file, select Export. The file will save in your internet browser's download folder.

Data managers can import new assessment skills and update existing assessment skills via Grading Data Import.

Tip: Use Export in New Assessment Skills to export the assessment_skill_id needed to update existing assessment skills via import and Export in Content-area skills list and Transferable skills list to export the mastery skill information necessary when mapping new or existing assessment skills to mastery skills via import.