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Uploading Your District Assessment Files

A district assessment is an assessment your district builds and gives outside the benchmark sequence, most often a midterm. Unlike your benchmark or state files, it does not have to arrive in a vendor's layout. You tell TKG Analytics which of your columns hold what, and your file needs only two of them.

This page covers uploading the file. For what a district assessment is and how to create one, see Assessment Definitions. For how a midterm is scored, see Understanding Midterms.

Before You Upload

Two things must be in place, in this order:

  1. Your midterm ranges are set. A district assessment is scored against your district's percent-correct bands rather than a vendor's performance levels, so the bands have to exist first. See Midterm Ranges. Until they do, the uploader shows a notice in place of the upload form.
  2. Your assessment definition exists. Create it from the Assessment Definitions page for the school year the assessment belongs to. See Assessment Definitions. Until you have one for the current school year, the uploader shows a notice in place of the upload form, the same as it does for midterm ranges.

Accessing the File Uploader

  1. Click the File Upload icon in the navbar.
  2. Choose District Assessment from the dropdown menu.

Only District Admins have permission to upload files. If you do not see this option, contact your district administrator for access.

Upload Requirements

File Types Allowed Max File Size Allowed
csv, xlsx 25 MB

Archives are not accepted here. Upload the spreadsheets themselves.

Every file needs:

  • a column holding each student's MSIS number
  • a column holding each student's percent correct

And, only if a single file carries more than one subject, a third column saying which subject each row belongs to. If you export one file per grade and subject, you do not need it: you tell us the subject on the upload screen instead.

Percent correct values

Percent correct is a number between 0 and 100, and any way your spreadsheet writes it is fine:

Value Accepted Reads as
78 yes 78 percent
78.0 yes 78 percent
66.6666667 yes 66 percent
0 or 0.00000000 yes 0 percent
100 or 100.0000000000000 yes 100 percent
0.5 yes, alongside ordinary values half of one percent

Whole numbers and decimals both work, and trailing precision does not matter. Excel commonly stores a plain 35 as 35.0, which is the same value.

Decimals are not rounded. TKG Analytics drops the decimal part and scores the whole number, so 66.9 is scored as 66, not as 67. This never moves a student into a different band, because your cut scores are whole numbers: 66.9 sits below a cut of 67 either way. It does mean a value is never rounded up across a cut it did not actually reach.

One thing to avoid: a file where every value is written as a fraction of one, such as 0.78 meaning 78 percent, is rejected. That is judged across the whole file, so a file whose only value is 0.5 is refused too. Those would be read as zeros and score every student in the lowest band. Convert them to a scale of 100 first. A single low value among ordinary ones, or a file where everyone genuinely scored zero, is accepted normally.

Everything else you tell us on the upload screen. Your columns can be named whatever your export names them.

Uploading

  1. Select the assessment you are uploading for.
  2. Choose how the subject is recorded in your files:
    • Each file is one grade and subject. Use this when you export one file per grade and subject, which is the common case. Your file then needs only the student ID and percent correct columns.
    • The file has a subject column. Use this when a single file carries every subject, with a column saying which subject each row belongs to.
  3. Drop your files in. A popup covers the page while each file uploads; keep the page open until it closes.
  4. Pick your Student ID and Percent Correct columns from the dropdowns. The lists are your file's actual column headers, read from the files you just dropped, so there is nothing to type. If your export uses names TKG Analytics recognizes, the columns are already selected and you only need to confirm them.
  5. In per-file mode, set the grade and subject for each file. Choose Algebra I as the subject for an Algebra I file: that is how TKG Analytics tells an Algebra I result apart from an on-grade math result for the same student.
  6. Click Finish.

Recognized Subject Values

In subject-column mode, the values in your subject column have to be ones TKG Analytics recognizes. These all work, in any capitalization:

Subject Accepted values
English ELA, English, English Language Arts, English II, ENG, REA
Math Math, Mathematics, MAT
Science Science, Biology, SCI, BIO, IBI
U.S. History U.S. History, History, USH, Soc St

Five of these have an (Alt) form, and only these five: English Language Arts (Alt), English II (Alt), Math (Alt), Science (Alt), and Biology (Alt). The short codes and the other spellings have none, so ELA (Alt) and MAT (Alt) are not recognized.

A leading MS prefix is ignored, so MSMAT reads as MAT and MSENG reads as ENG.

A value we do not recognize stops the upload and names it. Alg 1 and Algebra 1 are the common near misses.

Algebra I cannot go in a subject column

In a subject column, Algebra I cannot be told apart from on-grade math, so a student sitting both would end up with one score instead of two. An upload whose subject column carries an Algebra I value is refused for that reason, and the values it refuses are Algebra I, Algebra I (Alt), ALG, and MAL (with or without an MS prefix, so MSALG and MSMAL are refused too).

Upload Algebra I as its own file and set Algebra I as that file's subject on the upload screen. That is the supported way to record it.

If Your Upload Is Rejected

The whole upload is checked before any of it is stored, so nothing is half-loaded. If any file has a problem, none of them are saved and a popup titled Your upload was not saved lists every problem on its own line, naming each file that needs fixing, not just the first one. Fix them and upload the set again.

The usual causes:

  • A column you picked is not in one of the files. The dropdowns only offer columns shared by every file you dropped, so this usually means one file has a different layout. Upload it on its own.
  • Percent values are not whole percentages. See Upload Requirements above.
  • A subject value is not recognized. See Recognized Subject Values above.
  • A mapped column is empty, or the Student ID column holds something other than MSIS numbers. Both would import zero rows, so they are refused rather than accepted.
  • A grade or subject is not set for a file in per-file mode.

About the Grade You Choose

The grade you pick is a record of intent, not a scoring input

TKG Analytics always scores each student at the grade on their roster record. The grade you choose for a file is stored with the upload and reported to the support team, so that if something looks wrong later there is a record of what the file was meant to contain. It never changes how a score is calculated, and it never overrides the roster.

Picking 8th Grade for a file does not make those scores eighth grade results. If the roster says a student is in seventh, they are scored as a seventh grader. What the choice does give us is a way to spot a mix-up: a file marked 8th Grade whose students are all fifth graders is almost certainly the wrong file, and that is far easier to see when you have told us what you intended.

This split is deliberate. An Algebra I assessment is normally taken by compacted grade 8 students and by high school students at the same time, so a file spanning several grades is expected rather than an error. Refusing or flagging those would block a normal upload.

High school is offered as a single EOC choice rather than as 9th through 12th grade. High school assessments are course based, not grade based, and TKG Analytics scores every high school result against one set of EOC cut scores, so the individual grade would make no difference.

After You Upload

Your scores load when you click Finish. Turning them into impacts is a step our team runs afterward, so your assessment is not finished at that point and the tracker is not yet worth reading.

You are copied on a confirmation email recording what you sent: the assessment, the columns we read, and every file with the grade and subject you gave it. It is worth checking against what you meant to upload. A few minutes later, once the import has run, the import status email tells you how many rows of each file became scores and lists any that did not.

If you need to correct a file, fix it and upload it again for the same assessment. Re-uploading updates the scores already there rather than adding a second copy of them.

Your column choices are stored alongside the files, so if the import has to be re-run there is no need to upload again or to tell us the mapping a second time.

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