department head, dean, chair, or internal school committees
parents, parents' council, or directors
school administrators
school district, board, division or LEA
government

What sort of official report card must you use?
What data must you supply for the production of this official report? a percentage mark? a letter-grade? grades for each category or strand? evidence of most recent achievement? student age? attendance summaries? number of classes taught? anecdotal comments? performance indicators for selected learning skills? a grade for effort? attitudinal assessments? hours of community service? a prognosis? a recommendation for change in placement?
Are you expected to use Levels , Medians, or Modes? If so, what procedure must you use for determining these?
Are you required to generate interim reports? Are these take-home report cards or internal department/school reports or both?
Are you required to build an anecdotal comment for each student on the interim or the official/final reports?
How will you enter data on the report? hand-written? typed? as a computer file? given to a data entry person?
What sort of "internal" report will your administration require at the end of the course? Are you required to file a separate report for each failing student? Will MarkBook's Class Reports and Student Reports meet these requirements? Can you submit the report electronically?

TRACKING REQUIREMENTS:

Do you teach multiple subjects to one group of students? If so, are you required to track each subject separately? Are you required to amalgamate these subjects into one overall grade at the end of the year?
Are you required to divide your assessment data into time blocks such as terms, semesters, or quarters? Are you required to divide your data into curriculum units? Are these blocks/units equally weighted or is there a prescribed formula for combining them into an overall grade?
What items must you assess and record? Are you required to assemble ALL of these into one overall numeric grade or into multiple grades? Must you report numerically on some subset(s) of your assessment data and anecdotally on another subset? Do the anecdotal items also count in the numeric grade calculation or must they be excluded?
How are you expected to record and report assessment data? as numeric grades? as letter grades? as complete/incomplete? as pass/fail? as satisfactory/unsatisfactory? as "performance levels" or "achievement levels" (e.g. 1,2,3,4 or E=Excellent, G=Good, S=Satisfactory, N=Needs Improvement)?
What rubrics (rules, guides, or standards) are used to convert student work into performance levels?
What are the policies to deal with missed items and incomplete items? Is there a lateness penalty? How will you distinguish between earned zeros and items which were incomplete for valid reasons? How will you ensure that any student who has legitimately missed one or more items is treated fairly in any "compared-to-class-average" calculation?
Are you expected to record/report assessment data in two or more ways e.g. knowledge items as percentages but skills as performance levels?
What items must you record in addition to marks? dates? attendance? learning skills? uniform checks? classroom performance? hours of community service? extra-curricular contributions? effort?
Are you expected to issue and re-collect loaned texts, instruments, or other equipment? Do you collect students' money? How will you record and track such items?
Are you required to categorize your assessment data in particular ways? That is, are you obligated to create pre-specified categories/strands with fixed weights (e.g. Knowledge/Understanding 30%, Thinking/Inquiry/Problem Solving 30%, Communication 20%, Applications 20%)? If not, are you expected to create identical categories and assess in the same manner as colleagues teaching the same course in your school or region?
Are you expected to keep track of all grades and anecdotal comments on each official report for comparison purposes later in your course?

Use a short descriptive term to cross-classify your course into time or curriculum or achievement blocks. The default supplied with MarkBook is Unit but this can be changed to a word (6 letters maximum) such as Term, Sem, Quartr, Block, Level or any other word in order to subdivide your assessments into components of your choice. Once entered, analyze data by Block Title. See the paragraph on Block Title in section 2-2.

Mark Sets are independent collections of assessment data for a group of students. Each class may have up to 100 separate Mark Sets. Use Sets for time blocks (e.g. five Mark Sets: term1, term2, term3, term4, exam). Or, use them for independent curriculum units (see the examples in section 4-3). Or, use them for multiple subjects as per the first example in section 4-3. Selected Mark Sets can be combined in any proportion to generate an overall mark in a Combined Report - see section 9-7.

Mark Sets can be used to record learning skills, effort, community service, participation, or other items that you wish to keep independent of the numeric grade. To do this, give selected Mark Sets a very low weight (or even a weight of zero) so that they do not contribute towards the percentage attainment grade. See section 7-6 on weighting. These "non-contributing" sets can be used to establish a performance level using a supplied rubric or they can guide you in constructing an appropriate report card comment.

CLONING ASSESSMENTS

Cloning is duplicating a given assessment into a temporary MarkBook file (like a clipboard) so that the identical data may be used as additional entries in other Mark Sets or categories for the current class. A clone can be copied numerous times. For instance, suppose a class has just finished a major activity involving learnings in Design Technology, Science, Math, and English. After grading the report and entering the data in the Technology subject, the teacher could clone this assessment and enter it into the other three subject Mark Sets - all within seconds. Furthermore, the teacher could enter this assessment data into more than one component of each subject's records: in English, the marks could be entered in a "Writing" category and again in an "Organization" learning skill. In Mathematics, the same data could be cloned into a "Geometry" category and a "Measurement" category. Once entered, a cloned assessment's title begins with an asterisk.

For more information on MarkBook's cloning mechanics, see the last paragraphs in section 7-2 and section 7-3.

MarkBook will break assessments into sections or parts. An exam could have a multiple-choice section, a true-false section, and essay section and so on. MarkBook has the capability of recording each sub-section of such an assessment. See section 7-3, section 7-7, and section 7-8. Similarly, you could grade an entire research paper in a number of ways: organization, adequacy of references, clarity of writing, and so on. These could be entered as multiple sections of one assessment or as separate assessments each in a different category. MarkBook permits the entry of a single assessment item into multiple categories as in section 7-2.

There are three distinct types of zeros that you can assign to a student on any assessed item:
an earned zero. That is, the student was present, did the item, and got zero.
an absence zero which you expect the student to make up later. Mathematically, the mark stays as a zero until made up OR it becomes an earned and permanent zero after a prescribed time period has passed. This zero counts in their overall record.
an absence zero which you do NOT expect the student to make up. That is, you have decided to forgive this student on this item and it will NOT count in their overall record. Reasons vary, but this situation is commonly used for severe circumstances such as extended illness or bereavement.

MarkBook will treat each of these three kinds of zeros distinctly as you direct.
We suggest assigning a mark of 0.1 for earned zeros. This low mark is just as effective as a zero in the calculations. When recorded this way, this item will not show up in MarkBook's list of Incomplete Entries. See section 7-4 and section 7-5.
Record the "absence zero" as 0. See section 7-4. It will print as "Zero!" on your class and student reports. It will also be listed as an Incomplete item in summary reports and screens. Once the student makes up this item, edit the zero to the earned mark as in section 7-5. Or, edit it to 0.1 if the hand-in grace period has expired.
The missed-and-forgiven item should have no mark entered at all. MarkBook calls a blank cell "NoMark" and excludes it from the student's overall grade calculation. In comparing this student to the class, the "comparison class average" is calculated on the basis of only those items completed by this student.

MarkBook can weight or re-weight any assessment, category, strand, or Mark Set in a very flexible weighting system as described in section 7-6 and section 8-2. This includes the ability to zero-weight ANY item, category, or Mark Set. If you need to record a point-in-time mark such as a mid-term mark, enter it as a new assessment item in a "Reports" category and then give the entire "Reports" category a weight of zero.

MarkBook has ten different measures of 'central tendency'. MarkBook will determine each student's most consistent academic performance in user-defined levels. Two options are available for including and excluding the weight of each assessment. Discussions of this grading process are in section 8-9 and section 9-4.

MarkBook will record absences and lates/tardies for each student. See section 6-2 and section 6-3 for details. Once recorded, analysis is possible as described in the last part of section 8-1.

MarkBook has dual anecdotal capabilities. For tracking, the Anecdotal Notes button, as seen in section 3-1, accesses a running anecdotal record for each student. See the sample in section 3-3. For interim and official report cards, a report paragraph can be typed or assembled from MarkBook's comment banks. MarkBook will store up to ten sets of report card comments per student for each Mark Set and ten more for a Combined Report. Once built, these comments can be pasted or merged electronically into a comment section in other reporting software.

For the mechanics on anecdotal reporting for report cards see section 9-4 and all of Chapter 10 beginning with section 10-4.

In addition to its achievement reports, MarkBook produces a host of useful forms. These were designed to facilitate the collection and organization of data in a manner useful to you. See the following

seating plan/chart in section 5-4 and section 5-5. The 25-cell grid option is very useful for recording all sorts of numeric and non-numeric data.
mark record form in section 5-1. The upper two rows are named by you. If you are using Mark Sets, you may wish to use multiple forms - one for each set.
attendance form as in section 6-1 and section 6-4.
loaned item form as in section 5-6. Track serialized texts, instruments, and equipment of all kinds.