Since the buckets in the weighting form always add up to 100%, you may assume that an empty one would automatically subtract its value from a student’s overall average. In Edsby’s Gradebook, this is not the case. If there is an empty bucket, the grading will not include that percentage when calculating the average.
To explain further, if there is a weighting bucket with no assessments (or assessments without grades entered), these will never be applied to the final average. Even though the weighting form is setup to total to 100%, if one of the buckets is empty, the weighting numbers will then be applied against each other. For example, say you have four buckets in your weighting form: quiz, test, homework, and project, all weighted the same at 25% each. All the buckets have graded assessments except for the project bucket. In this case, the other buckets (quiz, test, and homework) will adjust and increase their value (relative to each other) to account for the missing 25% that would have been contributed by the project bucket. Effectively, the other three buckets will actually be contributing 33% to the average. Once a grade for a project has been entered, however, the weighting will reset – all buckets will contribute their shown average and the 25% value of the project bucket will be applied as well.