nemogb supports instructors “excusing” certain students
from certain assignments.
What does it mean to “excuse” an assignment?
When an instructor “excuses” an assignment, this is equivalent to allowing the student to drop the assignment. This means that the assignment will not be counted towards the student’s final grade. This is not equivalent to giving the student a 0 on an assignment. Excusing a student from an assignment removes both the student’s score and the assignment’s points possible from consideration for that student.
An Example
Mathematically, consider the common scenario where the student’s grade equals the number of points student received on the assignments divided by the number of points possible on the assignments.
For example, suppose that we have a category named Homework with assignments HW 1, HW 2, and HW 3. Suppose that each assignment is worth 10 points and a student Jenny received 2, 6, and 8 points on the homework respectively. Then Jenny would receive homework score (2 + 6 + 8) / (10 + 10 + 10) = 8/15.
In our example, suppose that we excused another student Timmy from Homework 1. If Timmy got 5 and 7 points on homework 2 and 3, then Timmy’s Homework score would be (5 + 7)/(10 + 10) = 0.6.
How to Excuse Assignments
Our notation for excusing assignments is molded around Canvas’s
notation for excusing assignments. Thus, Canvas users can simply excuse
an assignment in Canvas and nemogb will recognize the
assignment as excused.
Users of other grade aggregators who wish to excuse assignments
should set the assignment’s score value to “EX” for it to be excused in
nemogb.
Notes on the Interaction between Excused Assignments and Category Drops
In addition to excusing assignments, nemogb users may
also specify a number of drops that will drop each student’s lowest n
assignment scores in the specified category. Full details on the working
of drops are available here.
When working with drops and excused assignments, nemogb
has the constraint that all students must have at least one un-dropped
and un-excused assignments in each category. When necessary to retain 1
graded assignment, having excused assignments in the category can lead
to fewer assignments being dropped in the category than the n specified
in drop_n_lowest. Should this corner case arise, a warning will be
raised informing instructors to review the student’s grades, in case
their intentions are different.
Example
Consider the following example again involving Timmy. Imagine that there are 4 assignments named Lab 1 through 4 and 2 drops in the syllabus for the labs. Suppose that Timmy was excused from Lab 1 and Lab 2. To keep one Lab assignment with a grade remaining, we can only drop one Lab for Timmy. Thus Timmy only gets 1 drop rather than the 2 drops in the syllabus.
Other Constraints with Excused Assignments
As mentioned above, every policy category must have at least one
un-excused assignment for all students. If any student has all
assignments excused for some category, nemogb will raise a
warning detailing the student and category. For any students in this
situation, their grade should be manually set after running
nemogb.