As the Fall term draws to a close, quite a bit of grading is going on. If you’ve just spent the last two hours at your computer punching in student grades, this might be a good time to back up that work.

If you’re already in your course site now, just follow these 6 simple steps to create a grade backup:

1. Go to the “Full Grade Center” view, so you can see the whole grade grid for your course.
2. Over on the upper right of the grid, open up the “Work Offline” menu, then choose “Download”.
3. If you are hiding student grades in the grade grid, be sure to “Include Hidden Information” in section 2 of the Download grades options. If not, then the default setting are all you should need.
4. Click the “Submit” button.
5. Click the “DOWNLOAD” button in the upper left corner of the Download Grades screen.
6. Save the file onto your computer, somewhere you will find it should you ever have need.

Hopefully you’ll never need a backup of your grades, but hope and a backup will get you more than just hope.