Afisena
Someone has asked how your class is doing so far, so you open its marks. The term is a few weeks old and most of the grid is still empty.
That is normal. What is not normal is treating every empty box as the same kind of empty.
Which kind of blank
Take one column — say "Chapter 2 Test". Four students have no mark in it:
- Rina did not hand it in. The deadline passed last week.
- Dimas handed it in on time, but the answers are written work and you have not marked them yet.
- Sari could not have done it. The test does not open until next week.
- Bayu was never given it — that paper was set for only some of the class.
Four blanks that look identical on screen, meaning four opposite things. Of the four, only Rina's is "did not do the work".
So the gradebook does not use one symbol for all of them:
—not handed in⋯handed in, waiting to be marked○not due yet·not assigned to that student
This is not about tidiness
Sooner or later a school has to decide whether unsubmitted work counts as zero. Some schools say yes, some say no, and both are defensible. That is why the choice is a checkbox rather than something decided quietly on your behalf.
The moment that box is ticked, the distinction stops being cosmetic and starts being marks.
Picture a mid-term exam scheduled for next month. Its column already exists, and it is empty all the way down, because nobody has sat it yet. If "not due yet" were counted the same as "not handed in", one tick would score the whole class zero on an exam that has not happened, and the class average for that column would read 0. A number like that does not stay on the screen. It goes into a meeting, into a screenshot sent to the head teacher — and a number that has been written down gets believed.
So the tick only touches not handed in. Work that is not due yet stays out, because nobody has failed to do anything yet. Work waiting to be marked stays out too, because what is unfinished there is the teacher's job, not the student's. And work that was never assigned to that student is excluded under every setting: counting it invents a failure out of something that never existed.
The downloaded file follows a different rule, deliberately
Marks rarely stop at a web table. They end up in the school's own report format, or in whatever the district asks for, so there is a CSV and Excel download.
Inside the file, the four are marked differently:
- not handed in → a genuinely empty cell
- waiting to be marked →
? - not due yet →
~ - not assigned →
-
The reason is practical. In a spreadsheet, an empty cell is the only one you can safely sweep into a zero with a single formula. If all four were empty, that same formula would also give zero to the exam nobody has sat — silently, with nothing on screen looking wrong. The three states that must never become zero therefore carry a character, so they cannot quietly turn into a number.
A key to those symbols is written into the bottom of the file, so whoever opens it three months from now is not guessing.
The small number beside each average
Every average is printed with its denominator: "8 of 12".
Halfway through a term, a 78 drawn from 3 assessments and a 78 drawn from 11 are two different sentences. An average without its denominator invites the reader to assume the term is over.
The class average sits at the foot of each column, the student average in the right-hand column, and there is a filter by class. School exams are shown but left out of the subject average by default, because they belong to the year group rather than to one subject — the checkbox to include them is right there if you want it.
Where it is
Gradebook sits on each subject's page, next to the Analytics button.
Subject teachers, co-teachers and graders can open it. Observers cannot: they may look at the subject, not at a class's marks.
The one thing it does not decide
The gradebook does not decide whether unsubmitted work is a zero. Your school decides that.
Its job is to make sure that when you decide, the only cells you touch are the ones you meant to touch.