What is it for?
It is a different way of inserting a grade or mark. Icons can be used in iDoceo as helpers, with no numeric value per se, just being counted or as visual aides.
However, sometimes the more conventional grading system isn't as effective or what you are looking for, plus icons could look better in your reports, so you would want to use them as grades.
Icons can be stacked and their value will accrue. For example, a plus sign with 1.0 value, if represented by 3 plus signs, will be in effect a 3.0 in that cell.
Can conventional grades (either numeric or text) be mixed with icons in the same cell?
Yes.
Let's imagine a student has obtained a score of 100 in his exam but because of some sort of penalty you need to decrement it by 10 while keeping the original 100 score for reference.
In our example, we would type the original score in the cell, 100 and then assign a -10 value to an icon that would represent that penalty.
The resulting (internal) value for that cell would be in effect 90.
Can we use icons without any additional text or numbers in the cell?
An example, please!
For this example we will use a conventional grade From 0 to 100. We will then add some icon-values as a bonus (i.e. with positive values), others as penalties (i.e. negative values) and we will look at the results using a simple calculation
This is the original grade (from Main menu > Grade Types and Rubrics), a simple 0 to 100 score.
Because of the icons in each cell, the real value taken into account will differ from just the numeric value.
Now select the Simple addition modality, the result will show the real value of the Icons Test Column 'cell content' + its icons.
This new calculation column is not required. It is only shown in our example as a way to display the internal value of our 'Icons Test' column.
And here we can see the column with numeric values plus icons and besides the obtained column with only numeric values:
