Grade topics & weights

What are grade topics?

Grade topics are categories that organize your gradebook — like Tests, Projects, Homework, Participation, or Effort. Every assignment you create belongs to one topic.

Topics serve three purposes:

• Organization — they color-code assignments in the grid so it's easy to see what type of work each column represents.
• Weighting — each topic decides how much it contributes to a student's final grade.
• Input style — each topic decides whether teachers enter a numeric score or pick a label like Pass/Fail.

Topic management lives on the Classwork page in the sidebar. The Grades page is for viewing the gradebook and entering scores; everything you do to configure topics happens in Classwork.

Open the topics manager

1. Go to Classwork in the sidebar.
2. Pick the class you want to manage topics for.
3. Click the Settings icon in the top right of the Classwork panel — or click Create → Topic to jump straight into the new-topic form.

The same dialog handles everything: create, edit, delete, link to multiple classes, and set the input mode and grading scale.

Pick an input mode

Every topic uses one of two input modes. The choice depends on whether you want numeric grading or qualitative marks.

Score mode (the default)

Teachers type a number (like 87) into the cell. The topic's grading scale converts it to a label automatically (87 → B+). Use Score mode for anything that should roll into the course average — tests, quizzes, projects, essays.

Score-mode topics can be Weighted (counts toward the final grade) or No Weight (tracked in the gradebook but excluded from the average).

Select mode

Teachers click the cell and pick a label from a dropdown — like Pass / Fail, Excellent / Good / Needs work, or any custom labels you define. Use Select mode for qualitative marks where a number doesn't make sense — effort, participation, behavior, attitude.

Select-mode topics never have a weight and never affect the final grade. They live alongside your numeric topics so you can record qualitative observations without dragging the average up or down. The dialog hides the weight controls automatically when you pick Select mode.

Pick a grading scale

Each topic carries its own grading scale — the list of labels (and percentage ranges, for Score mode) used by the cells. Pick a preset from the dropdown in the topic editor, or click Custom to build your own.

EMStudio ships with five presets out of the box:

• US letter grades (A+ to F) — A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, F. The default.
• US letter grades (A to F) — A, B, C, D, F (no plus/minus).
• Pass / Fail — Pass (50–100%), Fail (0–49%).
• 1–6 scale — common in European schools (1 Excellent → 6 Fail).
• 1–10 scale — 10 (95–100%) → 1 (0–14%).

You can also click Custom to define your own labels and percentage ranges from scratch. Common uses:

• A behavior topic with Excellent / Good / Needs work.
• A reading-level topic with Above grade / On grade / Below grade.
• A skill topic with Mastered / Developing / Beginning.

How weights work

For Score-mode topics that are marked Weighted, you set a percentage that controls how much that topic contributes to the final grade. A higher percentage means the topic carries more impact on the student's average.

Topics don't have to add up to exactly 100%. EMStudio normalizes your weights, so:

• Tests 60% + Homework 40% = 100% → straightforward weighted average.
• Tests 30% + Homework 20% = 50% → still works. The calc normalizes against the 50% you've allocated, so the result is the same as 60/40.
• Tests 60% + Homework 60% = 120% → also still works. The 60/60 ratio normalizes to a 50/50 split.

Example setup:

Topic	Mode	Weight
Tests	Score	40%
Projects	Score	20%
Assignments	Score	15%
Group Work	Score	15%
Homework	Score	10%
Participation	Select (Pass/Fail)	—
Effort	Select (Excellent/Good/Needs work)	—

The two Select-mode topics are tracked but don't affect the total, so the five Score topics adding up to 100% drive the final grade.

How the calculation works

EMStudio calculates each student's total grade as a weighted average. Step by step:

1. For each weighted Score-mode topic, the student's scores are averaged into a single topic percentage (using total points earned ÷ total points possible).
2. That topic percentage is multiplied by the topic's weight.
3. All the weighted values are added together, then divided by the sum of the weights that actually contributed.
4. No-weight topics and Select-mode topics are excluded from both the numerator and denominator — they exist in the gradebook but don't shift the average.
5. Excused grades are skipped entirely.
6. Empty topics (a topic the student has no grades in yet) are ignored — they don't claim their weight until the student has at least one grade.

Topic	Mode	Student average	Weight	Contribution
Tests	Score	90%	× 40%	= 36%
Projects	Score	85%	× 20%	= 17%
Assignments	Score	80%	× 15%	= 12%
Group Work	Score	75%	× 15%	= 11.25%
Homework	Score	70%	× 10%	= 7%
Participation	Select (Pass)	—	—	— (not counted)
Effort	Select (Good)	—	—	— (not counted)
			Final grade	83.25%

The two Select topics are recorded as Pass and Good, but the final 83.25% comes purely from the five weighted Score topics. The percentage is then converted to a letter grade using the topic's grading scale. To see how a student's average evolves over time across each topic, open grade trends on their student profile.

Create a topic

1. Open Classwork and pick a class.
2. Click Create → Topic (or click the Settings icon and then New Topic inside the dialog).
3. Name the topic and pick a color.
4. Pick the input mode: Score for numeric grading, Select for qualitative labels.
5. (Score mode only) Choose Weighted or No Weight and set the percentage.
6. Pick a grading scale preset, or click Custom to build your own tiers.
7. Pick which classes the topic applies to. A topic can be linked to one class, several classes, or every class.
8. Click Create.

Topics created from one class can be linked to others without recreating them — pick multiple classes in the class selector when creating or editing. This is the same model EMStudio uses for teaching the same content across sections.

Edit a topic

Click the pencil icon next to any topic in the dialog. Every field is editable:

• Name and color
• Input mode (Score ↔ Select)
• Weight (Score mode only)
• Grading scale (preset or custom)
• Linked classes

Saved values are restored when you reopen the editor — what you see is what's actually stored.

No-weight topics

A No-weight Score topic is useful when you want to track something in the gradebook without letting it affect the average — practice problems, formative checks, ungraded extra credit, or a "Notebook check" topic that you record numerically but don't want to count.

Set a Score topic to No Weight in the editor and its weight is locked to 0. The grades still appear in the grid and feed the per-cell display, but the total grade calc skips them entirely.

Switch from Score to Select (or back)

You can change the input mode of an existing topic at any time. The grades in the topic stay where they are — only how teachers enter and read them changes.

• Score → Select: existing numeric scores are reverse-mapped to the nearest tier label. The cells now show the label instead of the number, and clicking opens the label dropdown.
• Select → Score: existing labels are stored as numeric scores under the hood, so they reappear as numbers immediately. The cells switch back to numeric input.

Remove a topic

In the topic editor, click the trash icon in the bottom-left. Assignments belonging to that topic become "uncategorized" — they're not deleted, but they'll no longer feed any topic average. Reassign them to another topic to count them again.

If grades aren't calculating correctly after changes, check common issues for tips.