Watch an overview of exemptions
Instructors can exempt students from content items and activities, as well as numeric, selection box, pass/fail, calculated, formula, and text grade items. However, instructors cannot exempt a student from a final calculated grade or final adjusted grade.
By marking a grade item as exempt, an instructor can document that a student does not have a score due to a legitimate exemption. Just leaving a grade item blank can mean multiple things, such as the student hasn’t submitted the item, or the item has not yet been graded. A zero (0) could mean either exempt, ungraded (when Grades settings are selected to treat ungraded items as 0), or failure.
Having an exemption setting supports differentiation of content and activities, and makes grading more transparent.
When an instructor exempts a student from an item in the Content tool or a grade item in Grades, the following pages are affected:
The process that exports and imports grade data includes exemptions. Post-processing during the import of grade data can differentiate between a student with a grade, without a grade, and with an exemption. If changes are made to the value that identifies an exemption during the import process after instructors have set export file values to depend on that particular value, such as the word Exempt, there may be unexpected results in the imported grade exemptions.
The exempt grade tool allows faculty members to exempt grades for students in accordance with their policies. Depending on the grade book set up using the exempt feature will have different outcomes.
In the points set-up using the exempt feature will change the total points a student can earn, and calculate their final grade based upon the new total.
Example:
Before Exemption: Total 100 points
After Exemption: Total 75 points
In the weighted set-up the exempt feature will redistribute the exempted weight for the final grade calculation or within a grade category (depending on set-up an item/category exempted). The redistribution will be proportional to the remaining items/categories weight.
We are providing an example of what is happening, however you will not see this visually in your gradebook unless you have only one student enrolled.
Example: Gradebook set-up: Exam 01: 25%, Exam 02: 25%, Final Exam: 50%
Before Exemption: Exams 01 and Exams 02 are worth 25 percentage points each and the Final is worth the remaining 50 percentage points.
After Exemption: The 25 percentage points of Exam 02 is distributed proportionally amongst Exam 01 and the Final Exam. The weight changed on Exam 01 from 25 to 33.33 (8.33 point change) and changed on the Final Exam from 50 to 66.67 (16.67 point change).
Again, you will only see the redistribution of the weighting when a grade is set as Exempt only at the Final Calculated Grade and the Category Subtotal.