Assessment for Teachers

Chapter 1: Getting Started With Assessment

The Assessment Solution will help your school shift from outdated evaluation to true real-time assessment strategies. Support learning growth for students with standards-based grading, online assessments and transparency with parents through student ePortfolios that capture both formative and summative assessments.

This learning guide will help familiarize you with the features of the Assessment solution for users with Teacher privileges. The Assessment solution builds on existing features within the Gradebook, however some settings will already be set by your school's administrator.

While this guide will cover many of the features available, please refer to our extensive support articles for specific questions or reach out to us at support@chalk.com or through our Live Chat service (available Monday through Friday, 8am-4pm EST).

The following chapter of our learning guide will go over how to:

Log into your account for the first time
Navigate the Gradebook
Customize your assessment settings

How do I log onto Chalk for the first time as a teacher?

This is part of our Chalk Solutions. This will be different if you are a free user.

To login to your Chalk account for the first time, you have two options: through email or through Chalk.com. Continue reading down below to learn how.

Option 1: Through Email

Step 1:

When your admin has invited you to join your institution, you will receive an email. Select Activate My Account to be brought to the account set-up step.

Option 2: Using Chalk.com

Step 1:

Visit the Chalk log-in page! You can find the log in button on the Chalk website in the top right-hand corner.

Step 2:

Use your email and your password to log into your account. If you haven't setup a password yet, go ahead and leave that spot blank and simply click login to get into your account.

Note: If you have any trouble, you can use the 'I forgot my password!' link and enter the email associated with your account. This will send you an email with a link to get your password set and give you access to your account.

Hint! Check the Stay Logged In check box to prevent having to log in every time you need to access Chalk.

Step 3:

Confirm your account information by setting your first and last name, your school email address and the password you would like to set for your account.

Select Continue and you will be brought to the next step of getting started with your account.

How do I navigate the Gradebook?

When you open the Gradebook, you will see the classes you are teaching, and the number of students enrolled in each class. If your school has subscribed to the Assessment Solution, your admin will have set up your subjects, students and classlists. If any of these are incorrect, please contact your school administrator directly.

By hovering over a class and clicking it, you will be brought to the Assessments tab, beside it is Students, and Settings. Let’s quickly discuss each tab:

1. Assessment

The assessment tab is where you can create, and grade assessments. Assessments are broken into 4 styles (Score, Rubric, Binary & Observation).

2. Students

From the students tab, you’ll be able to create and enroll students, generate a class roster, or view the assessment information for the students in your class. If your school is subscribed to the Assessment solution, your students will already be entered by your school administrator, so clicking that tab will show you a list enrolled students.

3. Settings

This is where you enter categories of assessments that you’ll be grading (homework, projects, test, etc) as well as the weight that each category makes up.

How do I customize weighting and categories for a class?

Customizing weighting and categories can assist in keeping your marking organized and coherent. To learn how to customize weighting and categories, continue reading below.

Step 1:

Open the Gradebook menu at the top of the page, scroll down to Settings, then click Class Grading.

Step 2:

Use the drop-down menu in the top-left corner to select which class to view.

Step 3:

All classes by default start with the following categories:

Homework
Quiz
Test
Assignment
Formative

You'll see each of these categories in a list on the left and visualized in a pie chart on the right as seen below:

You can adjust the name or weight of each category by simply clicking on it and typing. Wait a moment and you'll see the pie chart automatically update when it saves.

You can also create additional categories clicking the Add Category button at the bottom.

Deleting a Category

You should see an X to the right of each category weight, click this to delete that category.

Note: Once a category is deleted it can not be recovered, you'll also need to specify what category assessments created in this one will be migrated to.

For example, if you delete the Assignment category you'll need to migrate all existing assessments in that category to one of the other categories for this class. (i.e Homework)

Note: Each class must have at least one category.

Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available on mobile.

How do I create a grading scale?

Grading scale is the value you would like to apply (either through Level or Symbol, example A+, A, A-, etc) to a specific percentage. This is a guide on how to create grading scales to apply to either an entire semester, or a specific subject.

Step 1:

Open the Gradebook menu at the top of the page, then click Global Grading.

Step 2:

Click on Manage Scales.

Step 3:

On the left, you will see a list of grading scales. You can filter this list by the Chalk official set, your own custom set or a school set (if you have access to it). Pick a scale you want to use as your template, then click on the Create New from Template button.

Step 4:

This is where you create your scale. Please note that for the levels/letter grade names, you can enter up to a maximum of four characters. As for the value ranges, please make sure that the number that you are inputting is within a 0 - 100 range. (Note that these numerical values represent the Minimum Values of each grade range.)

You can also insert in additional rows to create more levels/grade ranges. To do so, click the Add New Row button found below the table. To delete a row, click the trash icon next to each row.

Step 5:

Click on Save Grading Scale. Make sure you name your scale.

Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available on mobile.

How do I set my grading scale to the school-assigned scale?

This is part of our Assessment Solution. You will not have this option if you are a free user.

If your school subscribes to our Assessment solution, you may see a warning if your grading scale is not aligned with the grading scale set by the school for that semester or subject. This will look like:

Step 1:

Click on Reset Scale.

Step 2:

A modal will pop up, asking you to confirm that this is the scale you want to use for your subject. Click on Yes, Apply Scale if everything looks good.

Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available on mobile.

How do I change the way my students’ marks are displayed?

In the Gradebook, there are 3 options for how marks can be displayed.

Default: will display your students’ marks the way you entered them in.
Percentage: will display your students’ marks by converting them into the equivalent percentage values.
Levels: will display your students’ marks by converting them into the equivalent levels/grade range values. These are based on the Levels/Letter Grade Range that you have set up in your Gradebook.

Here is a quick article on how to change these settings.

Step 1:

Open the Gradebook menu at the top of the page, then click Global Grading.

Step 2:

Click on the Display Options tab.

Step 3:

Select the Display Option you would like for your Gradebook.

Note: This will be the display setting for all of your classes in the Gradebook.

Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available on mobile.