One of GradeMasters stand out features is weight locking. This feature allows you to automatically balance assignment weights.
There are often times when you receive a syllabus and the grade breakdown looks somewhat like the following:
The thing to notice here is that for quizzes, homework, and essays, there is no indication on how many of each their are, and the weight of each one. If you are like me and you used some kind of spreadsheet tool for you grade calculator needs, then this would be a bit complicated to get going. First, you would have to either guess, or enter the amount of each assignment type. For example, we are 2 weeks in and it seems like we homework every week and it was a 15 week course, I would create the formula 5/15, and copy it to each cell for the weight of an assignment. This in itself is not the worst thing to have to do and is pretty manageable. But what if we get to week 3 and we don't have any homework. Now all my formulas are messed up and I have to change all of them, or change one and copy it over to the rest. This is something that would happen to me a lot. So when I was creating GradeMaster, this was one of the things I was sure to address.
So when would you use weight locking? When you are given a grade breakdown where weights are assigned to assignment types, instead of individual assignments, you would benefit from using weight locking.
Weight locking allows you to effortlessly update the weights of assignments that fall into the category we defined above. Simply adding or removing assignments is all that is required to update the weights of every assignment in that assignment type. If you edit the weight of the assignment type, that will also edit all its assignments weights.
For our example above, if we were using GradeMaster we would simply create an assignment type for homework, lock the weights, and assign it the weight 5. Now whenever I create or delete assignments, the weights for all the assignments of that type will be balanced. So in our example, I assumed I will have 15 homeworks and created 15 homework assignments in my homeworks assignment type. I didn't have to do any calculations and GradeMaster set each weight to 5 / 15 = .33. But once I got to week 3 and there was no homework, if I assume that the pattern still holds up but I we just didn't have one this week, I simply have to delete one of the assignments. Now all 14 of the other assignments are updated to 5 / 14 = .36 instantly!