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title: Overview of markbooks and general set up
description: Overview of markbooks and general set up | Help & Support — GO 4 Schools
---
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# Overview of markbooks and general set up
**This article is an overview of markbooks for Curriculum Leaders and teaching staff to support the set up of assessment tracking.**
The markbook is split into 3 sections.
The left side is centrally managed by School Managers; the right side is curriculum specific managed by Curriculum leaders, and the centre shows data from the coloured buttons above.
To manage the curriculum content you need to ‘Edit markbook’.
This can be accessed from the main Pathfinder menu by selecting the arrow next to the year group, the arrow next to the subject and then selecting ‘Edit markbook’ on the left or from a link on the markbook view page.
When you select ‘Edit markbook’ for a blank subject you are presented with several options. This document covers ‘Standard’ markbooks. The vocational markbooks must be set up in a very specific way, and do not offer the flexibility of Standard markbooks. We will also look at the option to copy markbook ‘Templates’ created by GO 4 schools and how parts of these could be used in your existing markbooks.
The next step is to select a qualification – either formal or a school-built Internal Grading Scheme.
Once in the markbook editor for an existing markbook (with qualification) you can edit or add extra sheets or assessments.
The most commonly used style of markbook has a ‘Reporting’ sheet and multiple sheets of curriculum assessments. **When deciding what to add to GO 4 Schools, it allows the department to review their curriculum and the quality assessments that take place throughout the year.** In this markbook you can see that there is a single sheet weighted at 100% and 4 zero weighted sheets which show the day-to-day assessments which support the teacher judgement for the reporting grade.
Once GO 4 Schools is embedded, or the school are confident in their quality of assessments, you could remove the first sheet and GO 4 Schools will calculate an overall grade based on the weightings of the sheets. In this example the sheets are weighted to reflect the weightings of the GCSE course. (with ensemble skills as a ‘nice to have’ extra)
Weightings can be changed at any time to reflect specific assessments such as a sheet of Mock data etc.
All markbooks must have a main subject grading scheme. This can be an official qualification, or a school-created custom scheme. GO 4 Schools allows a wide range of grading scheme possibilities such as Percentages, Percentage bands, Mastery statements, Numeric or combinations of these. Some schools recreate a GCSE 9-1 scheme but add ‘Working towards’ below grade 1. For each subject, the main grading scheme can be edited to adjust overall grade boundaries.
The grading scheme can be ‘capped’ to remove lower or higher grades, and grade names can be ‘aliased’ – so ‘U’ could be ‘Not yet achieved’ etc.
Within each SHEET we can also add a different grading scheme. This allows us to use the overall scheme with different grade boundaries (for past papers), to use a capped grading scheme (for Higher/foundation), or to introduce something totally different.
In the case of ‘Ensemble skills’ the grading scheme to show contribution grades are added as below. All grading schemes must have a ‘U’ grade, but you can see here that this has been aliased as ‘No contribution’ so this will display in the marksheet.
This is a really powerful sheet for practical subjects such as Music, Drama, DT and PE where you may need to assess group/teamwork or practical skills.
Grading schemes can also be applied to individual assessments. This example shows a topic-based approach, where the academic assessments use the main grading scheme, but the ‘Ensemble skills’ assessment has the grading scheme applied to a single assessment. You will also notice that the assessments are combined using the weighted average of all assessments, allowing the ‘Ensemble skills’ to be zero-weighted.
Assessments within a sheet can be combined in different ways using the ‘Change’ button.
If you are collecting general information that is not important to your overall grade, you can choose not to calculate a grade for the sheet. You could take an average, a weighted average and this would work for all assessment types. If you have a past paper with individual questions with marks, you could Sum, or if you have a Higher and Foundation assessment in the same sheet, you could take the Best result. Each of these allow all assessments, the selected number of ‘best’ assessments, or a number of ‘rightmost’ assessments.
Rightmost IS NOT recent – but if you arrange your assessments in chronological order, the one on the right will be the most recent. By selecting the ‘Rightmost 1’ assessment, you will get the latest data collection, or the latest assessment within a sheet. GO 4 Schools does not timestamp individual assessments.
There are 4 types of column that you can add a grade (form a grading scheme or ‘made up’), a mark (you can change the number), a checkbox, or a note. 
Here you can see an example of each. The Mark defaults to 10, but you can edit this easily. Checkboxes are usually valued as 1 each, but you can change this if required. The Note is a text field and cannot have a value or a grading scheme.
By default GO 4 Schools will only average data that has been entered. This maintains that if I enter a 4, I get a 4. If I enter a 4 and a 6, I get an average and get 5 overall. This, however, doesn’t work for checkboxes. If I have 5 and tick 1, it shows 100% or the highest possible grade as it ignores the other 4 boxes. By using the highlighted ‘=0’ box in the picture below this forces GO 4 Schools to count empty assessments and forces them to be 0/’U’ until data is entered, therefore returning 1 out of 5 to be 20%.
The padlock allows Curriculum leaders to lock an assessment to prevent further teacher input. The multi-coloured square allows the assessment headers to be coloured – possibly to group assessments together.
#### **Scaling grading schemes**
If you choose to add a grading scheme based on the main grading scheme for the subject, you have the option to apply ‘Simple scaling’. This is useful if you want to apply different grade boundaries, or if you want to delete grades to create a higher/foundation grading scheme.
A Grade 5 in a Simple scaled assessment will automatically map to a Grade 5 in the overall scheme. For example, if a Grade 5 in a Foundation paper requires 85%, but the overall grading scheme has 85% in the Grade 8 boundaries, without scaling the assessment would show Grade 5, but the overall grade would show an 8. With Simple scaling applied, the system will map the 85% Grade 5 onto the overall Grade 5 no matter what the overall grade boundaries are.
Also, in the case of simple scaled grading schemes, you can see that the top or bottom grades can be removed to allow a Foundation or Higher assessment to be set up.
The use of ‘No scaling’ should be treated with care. If you are using a grading scheme that is not related to the overall scheme (like the ‘ensemble skills’ shown earlier) the percentages assigned will be translated to the overall scheme, so you may end up with a ‘Major part’ contributing as a Grade 5.
The rule of thumb is to set all ‘different’ schemes to be zero weighted, where ‘No scaling’ does not contribute to an overall grade.
THE EXCEPTION…
If I want to set a Mock exam with 3 papers, I can add a new sheet and name it appropriately. I can apply a grading scheme for the SHEET which will be ‘Simple scaled’ to the overall scheme. The grade boundaries for the actual exam paper year can be set here at sheet level as they are for the exam boards.
The three individual papers can have grading schemes applied, but these will be set to ‘No scaling’. If they were scaled they would relate to a grade, and the grade value would then be averaged in the overall calculation. Using ‘No scaling’ will display the paper grade, but retain the raw mark for the overall calculation.
The option of ‘Advanced scaling’ is rarely required. If you want to explore further you can read the support article: [Advanced scaling](https://support.go4schools.com/modular/using-the-grading-scheme-editor-with-advanced-scaling)
#### **Using GO 4 Schools templates**
GO 4 Schools provides markbook templates for a range of vocational, GCSE, A level subjects. There are also templates for non academic tracking such as Reading ages, IEPs, Careers and Holistic tracking. These can all be viewed in advance in our ‘Sample markbooks’ school which can be accessed by Curriculum leaders at [Sample school login](https://demo.go4schools.com/sso/account/login?site=School)
If you go to the markbook editor for an ‘empty’ subject (with no assigned qualification) you can choose the bottom option.
For vocational qualifications, that you would like to track using their specific rules, we would recommend using a template. This will follow the rules of the qualification but may lose some of the flexibility of standard markbooks – you may want to try it first before adding lots of assessment data.
The templates are organised by type and by exam board. The non-academic ones may take a bit of browsing. Try looking in ‘Extended curriculum’, ‘Primary samples’, ‘SEND samples’ etc.
If you only want part of a template, such as a past paper with question level analysis, you could copy the template into a ‘spare’ subject’ for example; Registration, and just copy the sheet that you want into your existing markbook using the ‘Sheet options’. Just follow the steps to copy it into the required subject. Once you have finished, just ‘Reset’ the ‘spare’ subject back to empty.
More details in the [Template markbooks article.](https://support.go4schools.com/modular/copying-a-template-from-go-4-schools-sample-markbooks)
#### **Looking at data**
The overview of the markbook displays the calculated grade for each sheet on the right-hand side. You can also see the final weighted grade in the ‘Current’ column on the left – your school may have renamed this. The exact value of this grade can be seen by hovering over a grade.
Any grades that relate to the overall scheme can be coloured based on your residual schemes.
Clicking on a sheet name opens up the sheet to show all assessments within it.
Once in the sheet, you can order students by any assessment or left hand grade type. There is a link to return to the overall Markbook, or a drop-down to move to a different sheet. The ‘Tools’ drop-down contains lots of links, including going back to the Markbook editor, and the Subject explorer.
From the subject page (or the arrow next to the subject name in the menu) you can access the ‘Markbook all students’ in this case it combines all students from the 3 History groups.
This then allows you to rank all students within the subject/ year group for a single assessment.
#### **Subject explorers**
Subject explorers can be accessed from the subject page, the ‘Tools’ drop-down or the menu from the arrow next to the subject name. If you are unfamiliar with the basic use of data explorers it would be worth looking through the Support centre. The Subject explorer has the unique ability to access data for any assessment in the markbook. Open the explorer and go to ‘Add/remove columns’
From ‘Marksheet Data’ you can select an overall sheet grade from Marksheet Grade/level, or drill in further in ‘Assessments’.
In the case of grades, you could select the grade or it’s percentage.
Marks will show the grade, marks ‘out of..’, or the percentage
Checkboxes show the grade, 1 or 0, Percentage or Y/N.
If I have a past paper with 5 questions and a ‘Note’ for feedback, I can select each of these (in this case using ‘out of’) and get the data.
This allows me to see each mark for each student. I can also see the average for each question, so here the first question is out of 4 and the average mark is 2.2 – we can use this to identify any question with a general weakness. We can also sort by a column to identify the weakest students for a given question. If we had added teaching groups to the explorer we could identify the weakest students in each teaching group.
By switching to Student postcard view, we see an individual record for each student.
For further information on handling questions level analysis please refer to the support article [Creating QLA and Smith proformas](https://support.go4schools.com/modular/creating-qla-and-smith-proformas-england).
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