Grade entry is the screen where a teacher records the marks of one class for one course and one term. Open Assessment > Grade Entry, choose the course and the term, and you get a grid: one row per enrolled learner, one column per assessment component, and three computed columns at the end. Nothing is calculated by hand, and nothing is stored until you press a button.

The screen is built for the person who actually holds the exercise books at the end of the week. A subject teacher types or imports the marks of forty learners in one sitting; a head of department opens the same grid to see whether a class is on track; a school owner reads the submitted state as the evidence that every mark behind a report card was entered by a named person.

Three things make this screen worth trusting. The columns are never invented — they come from the assessment template attached to the course, so what you type is exactly what the final mark will be built from. Total, Average and Grade update as you type, so you see the consequence of a mark before you commit to it. And Save and Submit Marks mean different things: the first is a draft, the second hands the marks over to the class board.

The roster comes from the class, not from you

Each row is an enrolment: a learner who is registered in that class for that term. Adding a name on this screen is neither possible nor intended — a learner who belongs on the list must be enrolled first, so that the row exists and every mark has an owner behind it. The matricule printed under the name is the same code that appears on the report card, which makes a mistyped row easy to spot.

The last three columns are computed, never typed

Total is the weighted total on the scale your weights add up to — out of 100 when they sum to 100. Average is that same result expressed out of 20, which is what most French-language report cards print in the summary line. Grade is the letter or mention your grading scale awards for that total. You cannot type into any of the three: change one component mark and all three move.

An empty box is not a zero

An empty cell means the component has not been assessed yet, and it is left out of the arithmetic. Typing 0 means the learner sat the assessment and scored nothing, which pulls the total down. Keeping those two apart is what makes a half-finished grid honest: the screen shows you what is still missing instead of quietly penalising a learner for work you have not marked.

A long grid grows a search box

When a template carries more than fifteen components, a search field appears above the table, matched on name or matricule, with a count of how many learners are shown out of the total. Searching hides rows, it never drops them: pressing Save still writes every row of the class, which is worth knowing before you save a partially reviewed grid.

Typing

For a class of thirty learners with three components, typing is the fastest route. Use Tab to move across a row and down into the next one, and stop when the screen stops following you — the recalculation happens per keystroke, not per save.

Print sheet, photograph, AI extract

When you marked on paper, click Print sheet to download a PDF laid out exactly like the grid: the course, the class, the term and the template in the header, one tall handwriting row per learner, and one column per component carrying its maximum. Fill it in with a pen, photograph each page, then click AI extract, attach the photos and start the reading. The marks land in the grid as a draft for you to check — Ekati never writes a record straight from a photograph.

Import a spreadsheet

If your marks already live in a workbook, click Import and download the blank sample first. The sample arrives pre-filled with the real roster — user ID, matricule and name — plus one empty column per component, so there is nothing to set up. Fill in the mark columns, upload the file, and the grid fills in for review. Rows whose learner cannot be matched to the class, and marks that fall outside a component’s maximum, are reported back to you rather than quietly accepted.

Transfer graded assignments into a component

If your continuous assessment already lives in Assignments, click the transfer button on the grade entry toolbar, tick the assignments you have graded, and choose which component of this template should receive them. This is the cleanest way to make a continuous assessment mark mean exactly the same thing on the mark sheet and on the assignment screen.

Save is a draft; Submit Marks is a decision

Save stores the grid exactly as you typed it and leaves the rows open. Submit Marks is the point of no return for that class and term: the grid is checked so that every component marked as required actually carries a mark, the total, average and grade are written to the record, and a visible Submitted entry is added to the history with your name against it. A grid can be saved all term and submitted once, or submitted and corrected later.

Correcting marks after submission

Once a row is submitted its mark boxes are locked, so that nobody changes a grade by accident. Switch on Allow editing submitted marks under the grid, correct the cell, and save again. The old value does not disappear: the history keeps the whole sequence of entries, which is precisely what you will want the first time a parent asks why a mark moved.

What submission unblocks

Submitted marks are the raw material of the class board. The broadsheet counts, for every learner and every subject, whether that cell has been submitted — and it refuses to publish a class where even one is missing. Submitting is therefore not paperwork: it is the thing that lets a term’s results reach the report cards.