Grading Scheme

The grading scheme answers two separate questions for every grade level and term:

1. How much is each exam type worth? Homework 20%, Mid-term 30%, Final 50% — the weights must total 100%.
2. How do the marks inside one exam type combine into a single score? Four homework scores have to become one Homework figure before that 20% can be applied.

Most schools only ever set the first. The second has a sensible default and you can leave it alone — but if your school drops the lowest homework, counts the best three of five tests, or gives some activities more weight than others, this is where you say so.

Open it at Examinations → Grading Setup → Grading Scheme (the Grading Setup group starts collapsed — click it to expand), pick a grade level, and configure each term.

Note

Weights are set per grade level and term, so Grade 9 Term 1 can weigh things differently from Grade 9 Term 2 or Grade 10 Term 1. Use Apply to other classes to copy a finished scheme across grades instead of retyping it.

---

Start from a convention

Rather than setting the scale, the exam types, the weights and the rules separately and hoping they agree, click Use a grading convention and pick the one your school follows. Each one fills in a complete, consistent scheme.

Convention	What it sets up
Chile — 1,0 to 7,0 with coeficiente	Progreso, Desempeño, Parcial and Final. Progreso combines its activities using their own weights, so several small marks consolidate into one grade.
United States — weighted categories	Homework 20% (lowest score dropped), Quizzes 30%, Tests 50%.
United States — total points	A single category where every assessment counts in proportion to its point value.
India — CBSE internal and board	Periodic Test (best 3 of 5), Internal Assessment, and an 80-mark board exam.
United Kingdom — coursework and exam	Coursework 40% using per-assessment weights, written papers 60%.
Germany — 1 to 6	Oral and written halves, on an inverted scale where 1 is best.
France — 0 to 20 with coefficients	A single category where each assessment carries its own coefficient.
Pass / fail only	No numeric grade is reported.

The convention matching your school’s country is offered first. Exam-type naming varies between schools, so the dialog asks which of your exam types takes each share rather than renaming anything.

Caution

Applying a convention replaces the exam types and weights for every term of the selected grade. Any rule you had already configured for the same exam type is kept.

Build your own

If none of the conventions matches, pick Build my own convention at the bottom of the list. The dialog becomes an editor where you set each share yourself:

Control	What it does
Share %	How much of the term that exam type is worth. The shares must total 100.
Exam type	Which of your own exam types takes that share. Each one can appear only once.
Rule	Which marks count and how they are averaged, exactly as described below.
Add a share / Remove	Use as many exam types as your school needs, not a fixed number.
Distribute equally	Splits 100% evenly across the shares you have.

It opens pre-filled with your existing exam types split evenly, so you adjust numbers rather than start from an empty form. Apply to every term then works just as it does for a built-in convention — which is the point of building one here rather than editing each term’s card by hand.

Note

A rule you choose in the builder is applied as you set it. Built-in conventions keep a rule you had already configured for that exam type; the builder does not, because you picked it explicitly.

---

How marks inside one exam type combine

Each exam type combines its marks in two independent steps: first which marks count, then how they are averaged. Keeping them separate is what lets real conventions compose — “best 3 of 5 periodic tests, then weighted against the exam” is one exam type, not two.

Which marks count

Setting	Effect
All marks	Every mark counts. The default.
Best N	Only the N highest marks count. Use for “best 3 of 5 periodic tests”.
Drop lowest N	The N lowest marks are discarded and the rest count. Use for “lowest homework dropped”.

Tip

Prefer Drop lowest N over Best N when you expect to keep adding assessments. “Drop lowest 2” keeps its meaning whether there are five homeworks or eleven, because it is counted relative to however many exist. “Best 3 of 5” silently becomes far harsher the moment a sixth is added, since it still keeps only three.

How they are averaged

Setting	Effect
By points	All marks earned divided by all marks available. A 50-point test counts five times as much as a 10-point quiz. The default, and what Premeena has always done.
Simple average	Each mark is converted to a percentage first, then averaged. A 10-point quiz and a 50-point test count equally.
Per-assessment weights	Each assessment carries its own weight inside the exam type. Use for coefficients, or to consolidate several small activities into one grade.

Note

By points and Simple average only differ when assessments have different maximum scores. With everything out of 100 they give the same answer.

Where the setting lives

Set the rule once on the exam type, under Manage exam types. Every grade and term that uses that exam type inherits it, and it survives the academic-year rollover — so “Progress is weighted” is configured once for the school, not once per grade per term per year.

Each term’s card shows the inherited rule as “All marks, By points (from exam type)”. If one grade band genuinely differs, click Override on that row and change it there; Use exam type default puts it back.

---

Per-assessment weights

When an exam type uses Per-assessment weights, expand Assessments in this exam type on its row to set them.

1. Expand the exam type. Its assessments appear grouped by subject.

2. Enter a weight for each assessment, or click Distribute equally.

3. Check the total pill reads 100% for that subject.

4. Click Save weights.

Weights are per subject and exam type. Grade 8 Progress might hold four Maths activities and three Science ones; each subject’s weights total 100 on their own, because Maths and Science are averaged separately.

Rule	Why
Weights must total exactly 100% per subject	The same as exam-type weights. Saving is blocked otherwise, with the current total shown.
Either every assessment has a weight, or none does	A half-set is rejected. If one assessment were left blank it would quietly stop counting toward the student’s grade while still showing as marked.
No weights set is perfectly valid	The exam type then behaves as a simple average. Newly created exam papers arrive without weights, so nothing breaks until you choose to set them.
Publishing does not freeze weights	A weight describes how marks combine, not what any student scored, so you can still rebalance after the first mark is published.

You can also set a single assessment’s weight on the assessment itself, under Weight in category — convenient for a one-off test. The Grading Scheme page is where you balance the whole set.

Worked example

A Progress exam type worth 25% of the term, holding four activities on a 7-point scale, with weights 20 / 20 / 30 / 30:

Activity	Mark	Weight
Activity 1	6,0	20%
Activity 2	5,5	20%
Activity 3	6,5	30%
Activity 4	7,0	30%

The four marks consolidate into a single 6,35, and only that consolidated figure enters the subject average — where it is worth the exam type’s 25%. Adding a fifth activity changes the Progress figure but never the 25%, so the other exam types keep their share.

Under By points the same four marks would give 6,25, because a longer activity would pull harder than a short one.

---

Marks that are missing or excused

Mark	How it counts
Graded	Counts normally.
Absent	Counts as zero. An absence is a score, not missing information.
Exempt	Excluded entirely, from both the score and the total. The rest of the exam type is unaffected. A student excused from every assessment in an exam type does not have their report card blanked — that exam type is simply left out and the others are rescaled.
Not yet marked	On a report card the subject total is withheld until the mark is entered. On teacher-facing views the figure is shown and labelled provisional.

Exam types a subject does not use

Exam types are configured for a whole grade level, so a subject may legitimately use only some of them — Physical Education might run Progress and Performance but never a written Final.

Premeena detects this: an exam type with no assessment for that subject is treated as not used, left out of the calculation, and the remaining exam types are rescaled to fill the gap. It is neither counted as zero nor awarded full marks, and the subject still grades normally.

Caution

Changing weights mid-term re-shapes every result already recorded for that grade. The page warns you with the number of affected marks before saving.

---

What students and parents see

Published marks now show which exam type each one belongs to and what that exam type is worth, so a small formative activity is not mistaken for a final exam. Where an assessment carries its own weight, that is shown too.

---

Who can manage the grading scheme

Exam types, weights and rules require Assignment categories — edit together with Term grade weights — manage. Setting per-assessment weights requires Assessments — edit. Every change is recorded in the audit log with its before and after values.