What this screen answers
The class record answers "what is this learner's grade". This screen answers "was that a fair question": what the class as a whole did with each activity, one grading period at a time. Nothing here is a grade and nothing is printed.
The numbers on each activity
- Mean — the average of the scores encoded so far.
- MPS — the mean as a percentage of the activity's total points, the figure most schools already report.
- Highest and lowest — the two ends of what was actually scored.
- Distribution — how many learners landed in each percentage band, and how many sit below 75%.
Blanks and excused learners are not part of any of these: they are not zeros, and treating them as zeros would sink every statistic the day you lay a column out in advance.
The discrimination index
The one interpretive number. The class is split by where each learner stands in the period — the top 27% and the bottom 27% by initial grade — and the index is the top group's mean minus the bottom group's, over the points available.
- Positive and healthy — learners doing well in the subject also did well here. The item separates the way the term does.
- Near zero — everyone did about the same. Fine for a mastery check; unhelpful in an exam.
- Negative — the learners doing better in the term did worse on this item. That usually means the item — a misprinted key, an ambiguous stem — not the learners.
The split needs at least 10 learners with a computed grade in the period; with fewer, the index is left blank with the reason written where it would be, never guessed.
What to do with it
An item most of the class missed with a healthy index is a hard question — reteach the material. An item with a negative index is a suspect question — recheck the key before the scores stand. Leave out of the grade on the Activities page removes a broken item from the computation without deleting what was encoded.