Creating Your First Course
Overview
A course in AstraGrade is the container for your students, standards, and gradebook. When you create a course, you also configure the rating scale and the method AstraGrade uses to compute each student’s overall standard mastery. You’ll need at least one course before you can enroll students or record assessment scores.
Prerequisites
You must have an AstraGrade account. See Creating Your Account.
Steps
- Click Courses in the left sidebar.
- Click New Course.
- Enter a Course Name (required) and an optional Description.
- Configure your Rating Scale. AstraGrade starts you with a default four-point scale — Advanced (4), Proficient (3), Developing (2), Beginning (1), and No Evidence (0). Edit the level names and values, remove levels you don’t need, or add new ones to match your school’s scale.
- Choose a Proficiency Calculation method from the Method dropdown:
- Most Recent — uses each student’s most recent score per standard
- Highest — uses the highest score recorded
- Mean — averages all scores; optionally limit to the last N scores or drop the lowest
- Mode — uses the most frequently occurring score
- Weighted Recency — applies custom percentage weights to scores from most to least recent
- Click Create Course.
If you’re not sure which proficiency method to use, start with Most Recent — it’s the most common choice and reflects a student’s current level rather than early attempts.
The Weighted Recency method requires the weights you enter to total exactly 100%. AstraGrade will warn you before saving if they don’t.