- 1. Am I allowed to submit final grades?
If you are the primary instructor of that course section, then, Yes, you are the one who is allowed to enter final grades for your students.
Officials in your department/school use the IQuest system to designate who the primary instructor is, as well as who any additional non-primary instructors are. That information is then fed into the Banner student information system.
One way you can tell if you are the primary instructor for a section is to go to the online Schedule of Classes search. In the search results information for the section you are interested in, any instructors should be listed, and the primary one will show a "(P)" after their name.
If you see a discrepancy there, or if there are no instructors listed, please work with your department/school to get that dealt with.
- 2. When can I start submitting my final grades?
Online grading for full term classes will normally be available beginning the Monday morning of the week that final exams are held. The final exam schedule for all terms is noted in our calendars.
When can I submit my final grades for an early or a short course?
Online grading for shorter courses that do not last the entire term – such as first-half or second-half courses, or courses that meet only during the Summer Intersession or the Winter Intersession – will normally be opened as soon as the course is officially complete (according to the course dates designated within Banner and the Schedule of Classes). If the official end of the short course falls during the week of finals, grading will open up as noted in the previous paragraph.
When can I submit my final grades for a late-ending course?
Online grading for courses that end after the Sunday following the official end-of-term (according to the course dates designated within Banner and the Schedule of Classes) will normally be opened as soon as the course is officially complete. Most such courses meet during the Summer term and may end one or two weeks after the official end-of-term.
- 3. What is the deadline for submitting my final grades?
We ask that you please try to submit your grades as soon as possible following the completion of your course(s).
Unless a course is still meeting beyond the official end of the term, the normal deadline for online grade submission is the Wednesday after final exams. For example:
- Dec. 20, 2023 at 8:00 AM CST ... for most Fall 2023 courses
- May 15, 2024 at 8:00 AM CDT ... for most Spring 2024 courses
- Aug. 7, 2024 at 8:00 AM CDT ..... for most Summer 2024 courses
- Dec. 18, 2024 at 8:00 AM CST ... for most Fall 2024 courses
- May 14, 2025 at 8:00 AM CDT ... for most Spring 2025 courses
What is the deadline for early courses (Intersession or first half)?
For the benefit of your students, please submit your grades as soon as possible following the completion of your course(s). If you have some situation that will prevent that, the system will normally allow you to have until the deadline noted just above.
What is the deadline for courses that last beyond the end-of-term?
Online grade submission will allow at least a few days of grade entry following the official end of the course. Please remember that late-ending courses are bumping into the start of the next term, and those grades could have an impact on a student's next term course schedule.
If grades are not entered by the deadline, our staff will enter NR ("not recorded") placeholder grades for each ungraded student, and you will then have to submit official grade change cards to our office for each student to give them the proper grade.
- 4. Can I submit grades other than A-B-C-D-F?
Yes.
Instructors of undergraduate and graduate courses have been able to use plus/minus grades since Summer 2017. More information about plus/minus grades is here.
Please see Question 8 below for information on using INC grades. Please see Question 9 below for information on using special NS/WF/WU grades for students not active in your course.
- 5. Where do I go to submit my final grades?
SalukiNet Self-Service Banner (SSB) is where you will enter grades. While you may utilize D2L for grading during the term, D2L is not the official repository of the student's academic record, so you will need to enter your grades in SSB.
Once in SalukiNet, we recommend that you search for "SSB" and then choose the "Faculty Grade Entry in Self-Service (SSB)" task to launch it. That task will run in a separate browser tab (or window) and will take you into the new version of grade entry.
The new version of grade entry has some documentation to help familiarize you with it. Please see Question 6 below for that information.
- 6. How do I submit my final grades in SalukiNet SSB?
A new version of SSB faculty grade entry has been rolled out. Documentation to help familiarize you with it is available here:
Yes, that second document does indicate that you can now upload grades (by having them in a spreadsheet). This is a much-requested feature that our Banner vendor has finally integrated into the product.
The traditional SSB version of grade entry is no longer available.
- 7. When will my students see the final grades that I enter in SSB?
When you hit the [Submit] button to submit your grades, your students will not be able to see those grades in their SSB menus right away (though they will be able to see them in their "View Your Grades and Academic Standing" task in SalukiNet). In order for their grades to show up in their SSB – and on their transcript – our office will first need to "roll" the grades into their academic history.
Thus, until the grades are rolled, you have the chance to go back into SSB and correct (and resubmit) a grade in case you made a mistake in entering it. However, once the grade is rolled, you can no longer correct it within SSB, but must submit an official grade change card to get the grade changed.
Grades for early-ending courses are normally rolled once a week (over the weekend) starting at some point during the semester. Once Finals Week arrives, grades will not be rolled until after the grade submission deadline noted in Question 3 above.
- 8. Is it still possible to submit an "INC" final grade for a student?
Yes. However, please remember that an INC grade should be used only for a student who is doing passing work but is unable to complete all of the class assignments for reasons beyond their control. It is not an appropriate grade for a student who is not doing passing work.
To help such a student who will be getting an INC grade, a plan should be developed between the instructor and the student as to how the student will be able to complete the missing work in a timely fashion. (A formal Incomplete Grade Agreement document for instructors to use is available within SalukiNet.)
Please see our INC grade page for more details on the length of time that undergraduate and graduate students each have to complete the missing work.
- 9. What about students shown in SSB who are not really in my class?
Please do not leave any grades blank for students shown on your SSB class lists, even if a listed student is not familiar to you. It is critical that you let us know something about any student who is shown as still registered in your course(s). Thus, please note the following scenarios.
Students who dropped
If a student formally dropped the class, depending on when they did so, they may still appear on your list but with a W grade. You should leave a W grade alone, and you probably cannot alter it anyway. Outside of those students, both the Undergraduate and Graduate Catalogs indicate that failure to formally drop the class will subject students to special grades.
Students who simply stopped attending
For an undergraduate student still listed as a member of this class who actually started attending this class but then simply stopped attending (without formally dropping), you should submit a WF grade (along with the Last Attend Date as best as you can estimate it). This is a special type of failing grade. A different grade that may be used for a graduate student who started attending and then simply stopped attending is a WU grade, which represents an unauthorized withdrawal.
We recommend that if you have to enter WF or WU grades, that you skip them until you have entered other grades for this class. In other words, enter the other grades (that don't require the Last Attend Date) first and be sure to hit the [Submit] button. Then go ahead and enter the WF or WU grades (with the dates) and hit the [Submit] button. Based on what we've observed, sometimes SSB does not like the WF/WU grades without other grades already being present.
Students who never showed up
For a student who never attended this class at all, you should instead submit a NS ("no show") grade. This is really a placeholder type of grade to be evaluated by the Registrar's Office in conjunction with any other grades submitted for the student, in order to determine if actions related to full withdrawal from the University should be taken. However, please understand that the NS grade should only be used when the student was never known as a part of this class by you (or any other instructor); otherwise, the WF (or WU) grade is the appropriate grade to use.
While you may be tempted to assign one of the above types of students F grades, that is not appropriate. A student who should receive a WF or WU or NS grade must not be assigned an F grade, because the federal financial aid implications are not the same. An F grade should be used only for those students who were part of your class the entire time but performed very poorly.
- 10. Can I finally upload grades into SSB instead of entering them by the each?
Short answer: in previous years, No, but now, Yes.
The versions of SSB that we had used between 2009 and early 2020 did not have the ability to accept grades from D2L or other non-SSB sources. The grades that must be used in Banner have to satisfy the rules for the grade mode assigned to the course section as well as for the level of the student being graded.
However, a new version of SSB is being rolled out in stages, and among the features is an upgraded Faculty Grade Entry (FGE). This new FGE has an improved interface that makes it easier to navigate among the multiple course sections that most instructors have in a given term. It also provides more details about each student in each section.
This new FGE also allows the uploading of grades from an Excel XLS or XLSX spreadsheet. Such grades will be verified against what is allowed in Banner for the particular student in the particular course section, and the upload process will reject only those grades that do not verify properly.
Please see Questions 5 and 6 above for an introduction to this new FGE.
- 11. How can I best review my grades to make sure that they are correct?
Before you log out of SSB, it is a good idea to review your grades, to help avoid having to do any unexpected grade changes later.
Rather than returning to SSB's Faculty Grade Entry, we recommend you go to SSB's "Faculty Grade Summary" to review what you have entered (or uploaded). If there looks like there is a problem, then you should return to the appropriate noted grade entry page to fix the problem.
As another option within SalukiNet, you can open your Must Do List – one of the Featured tasks listed prior to the Most Popular tasks – to see if it shows that you still have missing grades to be entered.
- 12. Who can I contact with questions or for help with problems?
- 13. What if I missed the deadline to submit final grades in SSB?
If it's like 8:05 AM on the due date, please be sure to immediately contact the Records staff in the Registrar's Office – by e-mail at registrar@siu.edu – and ask them if you can have some more time. They are usually kind-hearted enough to allow you an extra 15 or 20 minutes to enter your missing grades.
However, if you wait too long, the bulk processing of grades will have started and it may not be possible to interrupt the inter-connected steps to allow you to enter your grades. At that point our office will have entered NR ("not recorded") placeholder grades for your missing grades, and so you will need to submit grade change cards that our office will deal with sometime after the end-of-term processing has been completed.
Those instructors who have had to fill out 100, 150, 200, or even 250 grade change cards after SSB grading closed have admitted to us that they would have preferred to have submitted their grades on time in SSB. (Something about sore hands and wrists brought them to that conclusion.)
