New "WebGrading" Receives High Marks from Faculty
By Merryl Rosenthal

Brooklyn College faculty members excel at teaching and enjoy the challenges and rewards of their profession. What they do not enjoy are the many administrative tasks that come with the territory, least of all assigning and submitting grades. Faculty frustrations were shared by the Offices of the Registrar and Information Technology Services (ITS). The process of grade collection was tedious, expensive and susceptible to error at every stage, from printing OPSCAN forms, distributing them to faculty, to collecting, scanning, and tabulating the rosters. Although our students had been accustomed to viewing transcripts and grades on-line via the Web, registering by telephone, and using a variety of Web-based productivity tools for some time, they had to wait weeks for grades. Throughout the entire process, grade rosters had to be kept secure and protected from tampering.

Recognizing the need to streamline a time-consuming process, ITS created WebGrade, an innovative on-line system. First piloted in Spring 2000 and recently used college-wide, WebGrade has been an immediate success and has rendered paper grade rosters obsolete. The process has simplified grade submission for faculty, saved the college money, and expedited the delivery of grades to students.

With a long record of innovative technology, Brooklyn College is the first CUNY School with on-line grading. The WebGrade concept was initiated by Registrar Joan Antonicelli and developed by ITS. It was implemented jointly by an ITS / Registrar team.

Ms. Antonicelli's interest in on-line grade submission began several years ago as a result of Internet discussions with other College Registrars. Convinced that online grading would be a boon to the college, she consulted with ITS on the practicality of such a system. ITS recognized that Web grading would be a logical outgrowth of our technology roadmap, which emphasizes Windows and Web access to centralized data warehouses via client-server technology. An ITS team, including Alex Rotkop, Karl Lum, Irina Shor and the Network Group under David Best, began to develop WebGrade. Security, ease of use, reliability, responsiveness, and accessibility were key to the design. Eventually, WebGrade grew into an extension of BC's SALI system, the Windows-based application used by faculty and advisement staff throughout the City University of New York to access and manipulate SIMS student data.

While the ITS team was hard at work building WebGrade, Ms. Antonicelli recruited faculty to test the system. BC has a large number of faculty members accustomed to using leading-edge tools in their teaching and research; currently, hundreds of course sections are augmented by Web technology. In Fall 1999, three faculty members put WebGrade through its paces, gave it a "thumbs-up" and offered suggestions for improvement. In Spring 2000, three departments piloted WebGrade: Computer Information Science, History, and Classics. First, the Registrar/ITS team met with the departments' faculty to market the system and provide on-site demos. Then, WebGrade was updated yet again to incorporate the individual needs of each department, and grade submission began.

With the success of the trial run and awareness of the new system's potential, President Christoph M. Kimmich and Steve Little, Vice-President for Finance and Administration, gave their support to full implementation of WebGrade in all departments.

The WebGrade team has worked hard to inform the academic community of the program's many advantages, thus assuring its positive reception. The system and its tremendous institutional benefits were marketed to the provost, deans and department chairs. WebGrade "veterans" were enlisted to encourage their peers. Most important to the success of the program were the on-line instructions and training workshops for the faculty and support staff members, developed and provided by the WebGrade team.

In Fall 2000, all departments used WebGrade to submit term grades. Nearly 80 percent of all sections were submitted electronically. Notably, more than half the grades were submitted from off-campus locations. Each day's grade submissions were processed into SIMS overnight so that students could view them on-line by morning. The faculty found the system easy to use and convenient, and the Registrar was able to process grades with a minimum of fuss and manual input. Throughout the process, on-line status screens enabled Chairpersons and the Registrar to regularly monitor the progress of submissions in real time and to review grade rosters on-line.

How does WebGrade work? Provided with a password, each faculty member accesses the WebGrade URL, selects the appropriate course and navigates an on-screen roster. Grades are either typed or selected from pull-down menus. The roster may be stored and retrieved repeatedly before the grades are submitted. When final submission is selected, a confirmation number is assigned and a final roster is printed. Once submitted, rosters cannot be updated online. Nightly, an automated process extracts newly submitted grades and updates the student's SIMS records.

BC anticipates 100 percent participation by Fall 2001 and hopes to introduce on-line attendance rosters in the near future. Although innovative technology made WebGrade possible, a carefully fostered partnership between the Registrar's Office, ITS and a cooperative and receptive faculty made it a success.

Anyone in the market for a few thousand unused Op-Scan Grade Roster forms?

Merryl Rosenthal is a writer and editor in the Office of Information Technology Services (ITS).