If your district is using Otus for standards based grading, it is important to make sure your Control Center has all of the correct settings enabled. This article is to be used by those with access to the Main Admin account, which is the account that houses all of the settings you'll read about below.

By default, Otus makes all state and common core standards available to teachers.  To begin your setup, you'll want to choose the set of standards you'll be using. You may also want to create custom standards.

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Choose one of Otus' predefined scales, or you can define your own.

Once you've created a grading scale, you'll want to decide how you're going to calculate your standards grades, as students will most likely be graded on the same standards multiple times.

There are five different mastery settings you can choose from:

If some of your teachers will be creating assessments with traditional points and not grading on a term-based scale, you'll want to set up term conversion to convert student scores on items and questions into a scale score for the connected standard.

Academic sessions and grading periods allow you to establish time periods for grading, for example: quarters, semesters, trimesters, and others. These time frames play a role in how the standards calculations are determined. For example, when assessments have due dates, those due dates will fall into a grading period, further determining where and when those standards performances will be calculated.

When viewing the standards gradebook, Otus calculates an overall performance level for each student on each standard. If you want to override the grade Otus has calculated, you can choose to enable Standards Gradebook Override by contacting your Otus Client Experience Partner (CXP. Enabling this setting will allow teachers to manually change the final grade calculation in the standards gradebook.

This is the ability to group standards together, specifically for making the task of running report cards easier.

Example: you can group all of the third grade standards you need on your first quarter report cards by creating a tag titled "Q1 - 3rd Grade". When you run report cards, you can then select this tag, rather than needing to select the standards individually.

Report cards can be generated for both points-based and standards-based grades. You'll want to make sure to complete this report card checklist so that all of your settings are pre-determined and understood among the staff that will be running the report cards.