A grading scale turns a mark into the grade a parent reads. It belongs to a department, not to an exam set: the same scale grades every set's marks, so O-Level can run A–E while primary runs 1–9 in the same school.
Find it at Dashboard → Assessment → Grading. The tabs across the top are your school's departments — a school that runs only one gets no tabs, because there is nothing to switch between.
A scale with marks behind it
Primary, O-Level and A-Level grades each cover a range of scores. The strip above the table shows the coverage of the department you are looking at, and tells you when something is wrong with it.
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Min score / Max score | The whole-number range this grade covers, from 0 to 100. |
| Grade | What prints — 1, D2, A. |
| Comment | Short prose printed beside the grade on the report card, up to 32 characters. |
A department's grades must cover 0 to 100 with no gaps and no overlaps, and no two grades may share a label. Overlaps and duplicates are refused outright; a gap is shown as a warning while you are still editing, because a half-finished scale is a normal thing to be looking at.
Below the grades there is an Identifiers card. Those bands are separate on purpose: a grade bands the subject total (0–100) while an identifier bands the CBC score (0–3.0), so the same "A" can read Moderate in one subject and Outstanding in another. See O-Level CBC scoring.
Nursery: letters, not marks
Nursery is different, and the screen is different with it. A four-year-old is not marked out of 100 and is never ranked, so the nursery tab has no scores at all — just the letters, best first, and what each one says on the report card.
- Open the Nursery tab.
- Use Add Grade to add a letter and its comment. It joins the bottom of the list.
- Use the up and down arrows to put the letters in order, best first.
How many letters you choose is the only decision: YoShule works out where each one falls internally, so a nursery scale can never have a gap or an overlap. Teachers pick the letter directly when entering nursery marks — see Entering student marks.
Adding, removing or reordering a nursery grade restates the letters already entered for nursery classes, so that every child keeps the grade their teacher chose. Nothing is regraded — but the change reaches marks that are already in.
What the card rates besides subjects
This section and the Identifiers card above it appear only for a school that runs an O-Level section — both belong to the new lower secondary curriculum.
A lower-secondary card reports things no subject grid holds. The lists it rates them from live on this page, under What the card rates besides subjects — three lists, each edited on its own:
| List | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Generic skills | Seeded by the O-Level curriculum template — the five the curriculum names. Yours to edit. |
| Games, sports and clubs | Empty until you add them. No template can guess which ones a school runs. |
| Values | Empty on purpose — see below. |
They are rated on the grades above, so the card carries one key rather than two. Teachers do the rating under Assessment → Competency & Projects; an item nobody was rated against is left off the card, and a list nobody has rated prints nothing at all.
Removing an item from a list keeps the ratings already written against it, so last term's cards still read correctly. Saving one list never touches the others.
Values are deliberately empty. The NCDC curriculum framework lists ten values and then states they "are not taught directly in lessons, nor will they be assessed". A school that prints them is making its own choice, not meeting a requirement.
What happens if a department has no scale
The screen offers a sensible starting scale for the department — the PLE 1–9 bands for primary, A–E for O-Level, A–D for nursery — which you can change before or after saving. None of them is a rule; they are what most Ugandan schools already use.
It offers a starting scale only for the departments your school actually runs. If Add Grade is greyed out, the school has not set its departments yet: do that on Settings → Academic structure first.