Not required marks for Summative and Ad-hoc Assessments

This article explains how to enable 'not required' assessment marks for Summative and Ad-Hoc assessments in marksheets. These marks help indicate when a student was not assessed due to absence, non-enrollment, or other reasons, allowing for complete data collection. Schools can enable these marks by contacting Arbor Support, and once enabled, they cannot be disabled. Existing custom marks will not be removed automatically, and schools are encouraged to update past assessments accordingly.

You can decide whether to enable optional assessment marks in mark sheets for your Summative and Ad-Hoc assessments.

Note: These marks are for assessment period grades only, not for baselines or targets.

When enabled, three new marks will appear on the Marksheet pages for all grade sets. These marks can be used for students who were not assessed.

If these marks are not enabled and not manually set for each assessment, the only way to indicate a student wasn't assessed is to leave the field blank, which will prevent your Mark Entry data from being marked as complete.

Enabling these marks eliminates the need for manual grade entries and allows your data collection to be marked as complete.

The marks available are:

• Absent - No mark could be recorded because the student was not present due to illness etc. 
• Not enrolled - A mark is not required because the student was not attending the school at the time of the assessment.
• Not required - A mark is not required of the student, for example, if they are not taking this assessment.

Here's what these marks will look like in the marksheet:

How do we enable these marks?

You can choose whether you want to use these marks or not - they are turned off by default.

To enable them, contact the Arbor Support Team if supported by Arbor, or your Support Partner if not supported by Arbor.

• Please include in the email whether you want to enable these marks for Summative assessments, Ad-hoc assessments or both.
• Be sure to cc in your data controller (usually your Head Teacher) if this is not you so they can authorise the request. 
• If Arbor Supported please also include the code 1062

Please note, once these marks have been enabled, they cannot be disabled.

My school already uses our own 'not required' marks

If your school has already created similar marks as part of a grade set, these won't be automatically removed. You will see both your old marks and the new ones appear when inputting a grade into the marksheet.

You may wish to go back through the past assessment periods and years, and change any old marks to the new marks using the Marksheet page. Just set the filters at the top of the page to the right assessment period, and click a mark to amend it. Completing this step ensures when you remove the old marks in the next step, no marks will be removed. 

You can then remove the old grades from your gradeset in Students > Assessment > Assessment Framework > Grade Sets. Click the grade set, then the orange Edit button. You can then delete grades as needed.