NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

To perform a Bear Tracks export, your gradebook must be set up and you need to have a column where the students' final grades have been calculated. This column can be any column in the course, i.e., it does not need to be the 'course total' column.

The final grade does not need to be displayed as a letter grade as you will select the column to be used to calculate the final letter grades during the export process.

If the column with the final score for your students is numeric, the final letter grades will get calculated automatically during the export based on the letter grade boundary distribution set up for your course. If you have not set letter grade boundaries, you must do so using the following article: Setting Letter Grade Boundaries.

If instructors are using Excel to maintain grades outside of eClass and are making changes to their student list based on changes to the Bear Tracks roster throughout the term, please be aware that due to differences in the underlying database storage solutions, there may be slight differences in the default alphabetic sort order of student names. For this reason, instructors should avoid copy-pasting values between spreadsheets using the two different systems. If such a merge is required into a spreadsheet outside eClass, instructors should ensure that both sheets are sorted on student ID number instead of the name before pasting or (preferably) import values between the two spreadsheets using the CCID or student ID number as a key value. 

Also please note that as of December 2022, Bear Tracks no longer accepts Excel files when uploading grades. Instructors should export eClass grades using the Bear Tracks format (as set up below) or as plain text .csv files.

Gradebooks exported as Excel files will not upload into Bear Tracks. Instructors should also ensure to save files as .csv (instead of native Excel file formats (.xlx or .xlxs) if they are using Excel on their local machine to store or adjust grades files.

To export grades in Bear Tracks format:

1. Click on Grades in the left navigation panel then select Export:
   
   
   
   
   
2. Select Bear Tracks Grade Export:
   
   
   
   
   
3. Selecting Bear Tracks Grade Export will open the options page for the export.
   
   
4. If you want to use a column other than the Course total to calculate your letter grades, you should set it in the Use this column to calculate the Final Letter Grade dropdown box.
   
   
5. You can also choose to include any or all of the other columns in your gradebook for your own information by checking beside them, but these will not be uploaded into Bear Tracks.
   
   

Note: You will need to verify your letter grade boundaries and check the required box before you are able to click Download to save the file to your local machine.

Once downloaded, you can edit this file as long as you save it in the same .csv format. For example, you might do this if you want to manually enter the final letter grades for your students instead of having eClass run the letter grade calculations.

Once you have prepared your spreadsheet, you can then upload this file directly into Bear Tracks following this tutorial provided by the Bear Tracks team.

For full guides concerning Bear Tracks, please visit: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/istea-campus-solutions/training-resources#h.ka37bzja7ty3

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

Once uploaded, students will only be able to view their own grades and you have full control over the format of the displayed grade. You also have the option to include textual feedback along with any numeric values you are uploading. Note: If you wish to import only textual information into your grader report, check this article instead: Importing Text Columns to the Gradebook.

A common time to import grades from a spreadsheet is when your exam has been optically scored by IST TSQS and they have provided you with a file containing the test results.

To import grades:

1. First, ensure that your spreadsheet has been saved in a comma-separated variable format (file extension .csv also called comma-delimited format).
   
   
2. Go to the Grade administration page by clicking on Grades tab at the top of your course page:
   
   
   
   
3. From the Grader report dropdown select Import.
   
   
   
   
4. Once you are on the Grade administration page, make sure you are in the CSV file tab, under the Import tab.
   
   
   
   
5. On the 'Import File' page, drag-and-drop or choose the file you would like to upload in the 'Import File' area, leave all options as is, and click Upload grades.
   
   
6. On the 'Import preview' screen, scroll down to the 'Identify user by' section. When importing student grade data, you can choose to identify students by either their (a) CCID, (b) 7-digit student ID number, or (c) anonymous ID (New in March 2018).
   
   1. To import student grades using CCIDs as the value for 'Map From', you will need to choose the title of whichever column that contains your students CCIDs in the file you are uploading. In the example depicted below (and in the standard TSQS optically scanned exam spreadsheet), this column is titled 'CCID'. Then, in the 'Map to' field, select CCID.
      
      
      
      
   2. To import student grades using 7-digit student ID numbers as the value for 'Map from', you will need to choose the title of the column that refers to your student's ID numbers in the file you are uploading. Then, in the 'Map to' field, select Student ID.
      
      
      
      Note that by default student's 7-digit ID numbers do not appear as a column in the gradebook (even though you are still able to match incoming grades on that value). You can optionally choose to include them in your course's gradebook using the instructions in this article: Viewing Student IDs in the Grader Report.
      
      
   3. To import grades based on student's Anonymous IDs (new March 2018), the spreadsheet file will be most likely be coming from a 3rd party homework website and students should only be identified by the anonymous ID. The 'Map from' value will be the column header for the Anonymous ID and the 'Map to' will be Anonymous ID:
      
      
7. After you have identified your users' data, you will need to map the grades data to an existing column or create a new one. In the 'Grade item mappings' area, match the items to the left (fields from your imported file) to specific columns in your gradebook by choosing the appropriate values from each drop-down menu. You should ignore any fields that are student identifiers (first name, surname, etc.). If you wish, you can also upload additional fields as comments for the students by selecting an import column and matching it to the item 'comments for xx' for the particular column, 'xx'.
    
   
   
   When ready, click the Upload grades button.
   
   
8. After clicking the Upload grades button, you should receive a message: 'Grade import success'. This tells you that the grades have been successfully loaded into the grader report. Click Continue to return to the Grade report and view the grades.

 

Notes:

• Importing grades into the column independently of comments will overwrite any existing comments in the grade column with empty values. Comments can be imported after adding grades without issue.
• You can only map one column into the comments field associated with a given grade item. If necessary, you can combine columns in your csv spreadsheet and then upload them into a single column using the instructions in this article: Combining Multiple Comments into a Single Grade Item.
• If you are running into issues with the import, please consult the article on diagnosing common grade import problems: eClass: Troubleshooting Grade Import Issues.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

Instructors experiencing issues while attempting to upload CSV files into the eClass gradebook can try the following troubleshooting steps:

Error message: 'user mapping error, could not find user...'

• These errors are usually caused by mis-mapping the columns from your spreadsheet to the corresponding gradebook column in eClass. For assistance with these problems, see the instructions in the knowledgebase article: Importing Grades into The Grader Report (or the link immediately to the right of 'Identify user by' inside the eClass gradebook when importing grades).
• If you have verified that your mapping is correct and still see this error, another cause of mapping issues is if a Student ID number or CCID has become corrupted in your spreadsheet. In these cases, check for the user id identified in the error message. These can sometimes be inadvertently converted by auto-formatting in MS Excel:
  • If you have a user whose Student ID number begins with zero, Excel will trim the leading zero.
  • If you have a student with a CCID approximating a date, eg. may4, Excel will convert it into a date.

Error message: 'Error writing to database'

• This error message occurs when the grader report is expecting to receive numeric values and instead receives textual data.
• The most common cause is text written directly into your spreadsheet in place of numbers as in the example depicted below:
  
  
  
  
• This error will also occur if you are attempting to upload textual data such as feedback or comments directly into a gradebook column. Text columns must be imported into the 'Comments' area of a pre-existing gradebook column following the instructions in this article: Importing Text Columns to the Gradebook.
• This error will also be thrown on rare occasions by user mapping problems. See the tips above for solving those issues.

Error message: 'Multiple users found with email address of...'

• Occurs when trying to map email-to-email and one or more users have a Demostudent account in the eClass system, usually because they have been a TA, etc elsewhere on eClass.
• As recommended in this eClass article regarding importing grades, we strongly recommend only mapping from CCID, student number, or anonymous ID.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

To import the text columns: 

1. First, create a column in your eClass gradebook to contain this information:
   
   
   1. Clicking on the Grades tap at the top of your course page:
      
      
      
      
   2. Click the Grader report dropdown and select Import:
      
      
      
      
      
   3. Click 'Choose a file' and upload the CSV file with your feedback comments.
      
      Note: the file only needs to contain a column labelled 'CCID' and a column labelled 'Feedback'.
      
      
      
      
2. Click Upload grades.
   
   
3. At the Import preview, map the items from the file to your course gradebook following the instructions in the article - Importing Grades into The Grader Report.
   
   
4. After mapping the user-identifiers (usually CCID to CCID), map the text column for import to the Feedbacks area for the correct column (under the heading 'Feedbacks' in the dropdown menu).
   
   
5. In the 'Grade item mappings' area, match the text column on the left (the headers of columns from your imported file) to the Feedback for the grade column that you have just created. In the example below, "Feedback for Class presentation" is mapped to "Feedback for Class presentation".  
   
   
   
   
6. Click Upload grades, then Continue to return to the Grader report.

 

Notes:

• The text you have uploaded will not appear directly in the cells of the Grader report. With Edit mode turned on, you can click on the gear icon in the Grader report in front of the individual comment you wish to view:

You can also enter a grade here.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

The TSQS optical scoring data provided by IST may include a number of columns in addition to the raw score including the students' wrong answers and their actual responses.

eClass Moodle will only allow instructors to import one column as the 'Comments' associated with a single grade item so for many instructors, this means that they need to decide which information students get access to, and which they don’t. The instructions below will detail how to combine the contents of two cells in your spreadsheet data into one so that students can have access to both sets of information in the 'Comments' field for a column.

1. First open your exam data spreadsheet in Excel. It will likely resemble the following:
   
   
   
   
2. Add a new column to your spreadsheet, and designate a name for that column in row 1:
   
   
   
   
3. Make note of which columns contain the information that you would like to make available for your students. In this example below, we wish to have both the 'Items Wrong' and 'Scored Responses' items available for students, so we make note of F:F (the column designation for 'Items Wrong') and G:G (the column designation for 'Scored Responses').
   
   
   
   
4. Select (click on) the first empty cell in the column you just created (in row 2), and in the formula bar enter the following:
   
   ="title1: " &x1:x1 &" ; "& "title2: "&y2:y2, where:
   
   
   • title1 is replaced with the title of the first column you identified as one to make available to students (so in our example, 'Items Wrong')
   • x1:x1 is replaced with Excel’s column designation that corresponds to your 'title1' column (so in our example, 'Items Wrong' corresponds to the column designation 'F:F')
   • title2 is replaced with the title of the second column you identified as one to make available to students (so in our example, 'Scored Responses')
   • y2:y2 is replaced with Excel’s column designation that corresponds to your 'title2' column (in our example, 'Scored Responses' corresponds to the column designation 'G:G')
   • Note: if you see no Formula Bar, you can create one by selecting 'Insert' and clicking on Function.
   
   
   
   
   After pressing Enter, you will see that the the contents from each specified column in row 2 have been combined into the cell you selected. In our example, the contents of cells F2 and G2 have been combined into the cell we had selected, E2, along with the additional descriptors we added to the formula (title1 and title 2).
   
   
   
   
5. In a class of many students, you will not want to retype this formula for every student, so next we will copy the formula to the rest of our new column. To do this select (click on) the newly formatted cell, then hover over the bottom right corner of the cell until the cursor turns to a 'Plus' sign.
6. Next click down and drag the cursor down through all the cells in the column and release. The formula should be repeated for all the rows in the column.
   
   
   
   
7. Save the document - it is now ready to be imported into the Moodle gradebook. When you map your fields, you can now to choose to map the combined column as comments for the associated grade item. For more information on importing the grades into eClass Moodle, please view the following article: Importing Grades into the Grader Report.