This is how the Grade Center is set-up to weight the grades:
20% Reaction Papers
20% Timed Essay
15% Research Project
20% Research Essay
25% Papers
Everything was working fine until a grade for one of the assignments in the Papers category was entered - point values would change but the weighted grade stayed the same. This only difference between this assignment and the others was that it had a Due Date that had not yet passed. Once we removed the Due Date the calculations were correct. Does this make sense? Has anyone see this?
Mary,
I haven't really seen this kind of behavior simply from adding or a removing a due date, but I have seen problems with category associations on columns that caused weighted totals to be messed up. So, the first thing I would check is to look in the Course Categories list (Grade Center > Manage > Categories) and make sure that all the columns that you expect are included in each category.
I have two questions: 1) Was the material in this class copied from another class or from a pre-made course template? and 2) If you put the due date back onto this assignment, does the weighted total stay as it is, or does it go back to being wrong?
The reason I ask is that I've run across one odd problem in the past, where grade center columns that were copied from another course did not get properly associated with the categories in the current course, but still referred back to the previous course. If we edited the columns and submitted--without actually making any changes--it fixed the category setting. For us, the problem showed up because students were getting errors trying to look at "My Grades" for the course, but I suspect it would also have impacted totals or weighted totals that relied on the category.
So, if your course is having the same problem, then when you went to remove the due date from the column, you also fixed the category. That is just a guess, but if that's the case, you may also need to fix the other columns as well, to be sure that the weighted total calculates as it should when other grades are added.
Mike