Manhattan's Grades module is designed for teachers who are already using a spreadsheet program to maintain the grades for their classes. It is NOT a replacement for a spreadsheet or grade management program. Instead, the Grades module is intended to provide a way to distribute grades to your students in "one click of a mouse" while protecting their privacy. In particular, it is intended to be an improvement over the time-honored technique of simply printing the spreadsheet file with only student id numbers used to identify students and posting it on your office door.
From the student's perspective, things are quite simple. Every time the teacher posts new grades to the classroom, the Grades module button will be marked with a red star. When a student clicks on the grades button, he will see his current grades.
Things are also quite simple from the teacher's perspective (I hope!). You continue to use Excel, or Works, or Quattro Pro, or whatever spreadsheet program you want to manage your grades. The only requirement is that the first column of your spreadsheet must contain the student ID numbers, as recorded in Manhattan (more on this later). Then, whenever you want to post your grades to the Manhattan classroom, use your spreadsheet's Save As command to save the grades as a "TAB-delimited text file". You then login to Manhattan, enter the Grades module, click on "Submit new grades file" and attach the file. Manhattan will distribute the grades to your students, so that each student sees only his or her grades.
A spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel can be a powerful tool for managing grades. You can insert formulas, for example, to automatically drop the lowest grades or to calculate the final letter grade based on weights applied to each graded item during the course. While there are a number of programs specifically designed to manage grades, you will find that none of them are as flexible as a spreadsheet program, which you probably already own, for managing grades.
A complete description of how to use a spreadsheet program to manage grades is beyond the intent of this manual. The following sections should include enough information, using Microsoft Excel as the spreadsheet program, to get you started.