Extra Credit in Sakai
Often times an instructor wishes to add extra, non-required assignments and reward the
students with bonus points. In Sakai, however, you are not allowed to create a Gradebook item “out of
zero” points. However, there are three different ways to still include extra credit in Sakai.
1. Adding bonus points to another assignment
2. Adding a Gradebook entry with a point value of .01
3. Keeping track of the points in a Gradebook item and manually overriding grades later
Of these, each one has specific instances when it may be better than the others. In this guide we will
cover those instances, and explain each method for including extra credit.
The first method is to put the extra credit on top of another grade, whether it is relevant to the
extra points or not. To get started, we can choose any Gradebook item from the list, in the “Gradebook
Items” section of the tool.
For this example, we have given an extra credit assignment, and we would like to award 20 points to a
student for it. We would first click “Exam #1,” which takes us to the scoring page
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We then change this point total by simply adding 20 points onto whoever we wish to receive the points.
This then gives the student an extra 20 points. The drawback of this method is that this may be a little
confusing. The student did not really get 90 points on the exam, he got 70, but it will show as 90 after
the extra credit.
The second method is to add a Gradebook item with a point value of .01. Since the value has to
be greater than zero, this is the next best we can do. To do this, choose “Add Gradebook Item(s)”
Then, when adding this Gradebook item, identify that it is Extra Credit and has a point value of .01.
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We can then select it from the list of Gradebook items, and give the student his 20 points this way.
From the student’s perspective, he will then see the following:
One drawback to this is that it makes the grades seem a little more awkward. The students who do not
do extra credit will have a 0/.01 in that column, which will technically affect their grade, just extremely
minimally. In a course with 1000 points, a student with a 90% would be reduced to an 89.9991% by not
doing extra credit. This is a minor drawback, but if everyone understands what is happening with the
extra credit field being out of .01, it should not be a major issue.
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The last method waits until the instructor is ready to update the grades. Similar to before, we
add a new Gradebook Item called “Extra Credit,” except this time the point value does not matter. In
this scenario, we do not calculate it in course grades. Releasing to students is optional.
This helps the instructor keep track of extra credit over the course of the semester. When it comes time
to release grades, we will then go to the Course Grades tab.
From here, we can manually override course grades, namely, students whose extra credit changes their
letter grade.
This will then give the student an A instead of a B-. Regardless of all other grades, this student will now
have an A in the class, in this case a 95% because that is the minimum for an A in this Gradebook.
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So, to summarize, this is a way of manually keeping track of extra credit and overriding the calculated
course grade, in order to reflect the extra credit that the student has earned.
Extra credit is a very common element in instructors’ course grade calculations. Intuitively, one
would assume to make a Gradebook item worth zero points and add points accordingly, but this
introduces a “divide by zero” error in Sakai. To get around this, we either add the points to another
assignment, add a new item with a point value of .01, or manually override the grades.
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