How Students View Course Grades. Okay. Do we really need two chapters of movies before you can use Blackboard's Grade Center? Of course not. This chapter shows you just the basics, which for most instructors is all you're ever going to need. However, Blackboard's Grade Center has a lot of neat bells and whistles. You can see courses where you are an instructor. That just opens up the Full Grade Center. Well, actually, log off as Patrick Crispin and login as Aiden Jones. All the folder items that are empty no longer show up. There's also something called the Blackboard Mobile Learn App, and it runs on iOS, Android, or Blackberry. The only people who can see everyone's grades, who can enter or change grades, are instructors, teaching assistants, graders, and system administrators. What You Need to Know About the Grade Center. Grade Center Basics. Entering Grades. Now that we have a Score column, entering grades is a snap.
Click the cell, for the grade you want to enter. Key in the grade, we'll give this student a 95, and then hit the Enter or Return key on your keyboard. It may take a second or two to save, remember Blackboard's grade center is a full fledged web spreadsheet program, and it's probably going to be the slowest page in Blackboard. But, once it's saved. That's it. If you chose to show this column to students this grade now appears on the student's My Grades page. Before you do anything check this Grade Information bar. Now, I've seen some faculty say I don't want my student to see this. I can just power through this list. Type 75 and then hit Enter. One last thing I need to show you before we get into some of the more advanced features is that zeros matter.
I never leave a grade center cell blank. It shows me that it's not visible to users. It's really easy to overlook that, and I actually choose not to hide grades. Manually Entering Grades. Blackboard Inline Grading for Assignments. Changing Grades. At First Blush, this movie's topic seems a little silly. How do you change your grade in Blackboard, just enter a new grade and hit Enter. I want to give the student an 80, I, there it is, there's an 80. How hard was that? Well, there are actually a few other tricks you can use to change a grade. We showed you earlier in this chapter that one of the more powerful ways to change a student's grade is to manually exempt it. I'm going to click on this little downward-facing chevron, and choose Exempt Grade. Although, remember, there is a grade history if I want to go see it.
What I could do, is I could go back to a student's score and add additional points to that. I am going to include it in the Grade Center calculations. Don't count it, Submit, and then scroll all the way over to the right and type whatever score you want to give the student. This is a true final grade for the students and you notice that with a green check box. Regrading tests. Let's say we gave students a Blackboard test, the students have submitted their answers, and, we then discover that one of the questions has an incorrect right answer or point value.
Happens all the time. In older versions of Blackboard, you'd have to manually grade every student's test again, and then, manually change the points for each question you messed up test by test. It took forever. This was fixed in service pack 8 and remember we're running service pack 13. To fix a test question in a test you've already deployed, the students have already answered, all you have to do is edit the test.
And to edit the test, there are several different ways to get to it. You can go into the full grade center, I'm just going to click the shortcut link to get there. All three take you to the same place and all three are going to show you this orangish yellow box at the top of the page, saying this test has a certain number of attempts. And click on Submit and Regrade. How to Customize the Grade Center. Adding Columns to the Grade Center. Creating Grade Columns. Create a Column. Creating Score Columns. I earlier described the Blackboard's grade centers kind of like a simplified version of MIcrosoft Excel for the Web and that's true. But unlike Microsoft Excel where the spreadsheet columns are there just by default In Blackboard's Grade Center you have to manually create each score column, although you'll see in later chapters that when you create gradeable items within your course, things like assignments, surveys, tests and some discussion boards, blogs, journals, wikis.
Blackboard will automatically create a grade center score column for those. But, how do you manually create a score column, a column into which you can manually enter your students' grades? Well, let's open the Grade Center. I'm going to scroll down again. Click the Grade Center. You only got of a 14 or 15 characters or fewer. This description. Complete, incomplete is, well, if you did it, you passed, and you get a check mark. I'm just going to do 100. So I want to choose October first. It says, don't count this. Managing Columns in the Grade Center. So, I am here at the grade center and in the last chapter and again in the last movie, we created some score columns in our grade center. We've a mid term that's actually worth 100 points. We've created a nickname column, it's a text column, that isn't worth anything, doesn't count towards the students' final grades.
And in fact isn't actually shown to the students, it's hidden from them. That's great, but out grade center now is one hotness. To re-arrange your grade center, remove columns around. We notice that the username is on, it's shown and then student ID, last access and availability are hidden. Let's clean this up. So I've got weighted total and I have to drag. Let's go and take that nickname column which is here, but I kind of want to freeze it.
That's a text column we created in the last movie. But the column and its grades still appear for the students. And I want to turn on last access. Organize Columns. Calculated Columns. Calculated Columns: Total & Weighted Blackboard’s Grade Center can be used to calculate final grades for you, regardless if you use Blackboard to deliver assignments, assessments and other grade-able activities, or just manually enter grades into manually created columns.
Weighted Calculated Columns In the Grade Center, you can weight grades either by individual items or by categories. Note: If you weight your grades by category, you have the option of dropping the lowest grade in the category; if you weight by item, you do not have this option. This page from Loyola University Chicago has detailed examples for understanding how Blackboard calculates weighted grades. Before creating a Weighted Total Column using Category Weights, you should be sure that all of your assignments, tests, manually created columns, etc., are associated with a category, so that the Grade Center knows what to include in calculating the final grade. To create a weighted calculated column: Total Calculated Columns. Color Coding the Grade Center. In the last chapter we focused on the basics of Blackboard's grade center and for most instructors that chapter is all you're ever going to need.
But, what if you want to do more? You want to move columns around. Create grading periods, weight your grades. Well, that's what we're going to talk about in this chapter and in this first movie I want to talk about an often overlooked feature of Blackboard's grade center, color coding. On these heat maps, green means good, yellow means caution, red means bad.
This opens up the grade center. You can change the colors for items that are in progress, needs grading or exempt for grading. I get to choose the color green from this screen and click on Apply. And I'll apply it, and I can't read that. And my grade center is now automatically color coded. In the next movie, I'm going to show you how to add a text column to your Grade Center. Color Code the Grade Center. Create a Smart View of Grade Center Data. Downloading Grades to Edit in Excel. As you have seen over last two chapters, Blackboard's Grade Center has a lot of helpful features. But what if you want to work on your Grade Center offline, in a full fledged spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, it's actually really easy to do, but I have two really strong recommendations for you before you even think about doing this. First, check with your institution to see what there policies are. For storing student data on a personal computer.
Some institutions specifically prohibit you doing this unless your hard drive is encrypted. I don't want to get you in trouble, so check your institution's policies. So I'm just going to click on Submit and then click on Download. Well, sort of. A vertical line called a pipe and a unique numeric column identifier. In fact, in this term paper, I'm going to give everybody a score of 100. This is a text file. And when you're ready to upload this Excel spreadsheet back into Blackboard, we're going to hop over to the next movie. Downloading the Grade Center. As we saw in the last movie, the limitation of viewing your rosters by going to Users and Groups> Users is that you can't actually download a copy of this to your hard drive. Let's fix that by going not to the User screen but rather by going to the Grade Center.
We have two chapters on how to use the grade center. For now we're just going to look at the student roster. What I'm going to do is, let me actually minimize users and groups. In Course Management, which is your instructor tool kit, I'm going to click on Grade Center. Now, there are two ways to open the grade center. Now, there are a lot of options on this page. I'm going to click on Submit. There is my student roster in Microsoft Excel. How to Download and Upload Grades from the Grade Center. How to download the Grade Center from Blackboard. Uploading Grades. Uploading a file to the Blackboard Grade Center.
How to Download Assignments. How to Download Assignments - Blackboard Help. You can download assignment submissions to review them offline instead of reviewing them online. Choose to download all or only selected submissions as a single ZIP file. Unzip or expand the file to view the contents. Each submission is saved as a separate file. Windows and Mac computers have built-in capabilities to view and extract compressed ZIP file packages. How to Download Assignments In the Grade Center, locate the column for the assignment you want to download. In the pop-up window, click Save File and click OK. When you use the download function, usernames are included automatically in the file names for easy identification. If a student added an attachment, the downloaded ZIP file may contain two files for each student: the attached file and a TXT file produced by the Grade Center that contains information about the submission and student comments.
The Assignment File Cleanup function allows you to select students and delete files associated with their submissions. Understanding Weighted Grades - Experts Knowledge Base - Experts. There are several different ways to calculate weighted totals in Blackboard. The following includes examples on how Blackboard calculates weighted grades. This guide was adapted from Loyola University in Chicago. For information on how to create a weighted column using categories in Blackboard please click here. To calculate the weighted total by item To illustrate weighted grade calculation, the following example will be used. Blackboard's formula for weighted total by item: [(Earned points on item1/total points possible for item1) X (weight of item1)]+ [(Earned points on item2/total points possible for item2) X (weight of item2)] + [(Earned points on item3/total points possible for item3) X (weight of item3)] + [(Earned points on item4/total points possible for item4) X (weight of item4)] Icon Do not use the weighted score to reproduce percentages.
To calculate the weighted total by weighing by category Using the Blackboard formula here is how the Weighted Total would be calculated: Setting up Categories and Weighting. Creating a Calculated Column with a Weighted Total. Configure Weighted Grades in Blackboard. Weighting Grades. Between our last movie and this one, I reset the grade center so that it, we're no longer dropping any scores, and all the score columns are once again included in the total.
By default, every Blackboard grade center has a total column, which we've talked about, and a weighted total column, which we haven't really talked about. So let's say I've got four quizzes and I want to make them worth 20% of the final grade. My four papers, we'll make those 20% as well. Classroom participation 10% and the midterm and final together are going to be worth 50%. So let's set that up. But I'm not sure that's the most efficient way, especially since we've used categories. So we know that my tests are going to be worth 50%. You need to make sure, and it's going to show up down here at the bottom that the total weight is worth 100%. Do I want all my students to see it? The complex algebra of how Blackboard calculates weighted grades. SafeAssign. How to Use SafeAssign in Assignments. Creating Grading Periods.
I'm going to be completely honest with you. If you teach a class that only lasts one semester, trimester, or term, or if your Grade Center's not going to have more than, say, 15 or 20 score columns, you really don't need to watch this movie. However, if you teach one course where your students are going to stay the same from term to term, from nine weeks to nine weeks, or from semester to semester. Or if you're going to have dozens upon dozens of score columns This movie is going to cause you to do a happy dance. So far, when we've had access to the Grade Center, we've seen every column or at least every column that we haven't hidden in Manage Column Organization. Between the last movie and this movie, I want you to notice, I've been kind of busy.
I've added four quizzes, four term papers, a midterm, a final, and classroom participation. And Blackboard's Grade Center which is already slow becomes downright glacial. And then click on Create Grading Period. Creating Grading Categories. Besides grading periods, another way to bring some order to your grade center is to use categories. Categories can also be really helpful if you want to drop a student's lowest score or even weight grades. Something we'll talk about in the next two movies. In the last movie we introduced a bunch of new score columns. We've got four new quiz columns, four term paper columns, a final, class participation. That's in addition to the midterm column we created last chapter.
So I'm going to go to Manage and go to Categories. And, the next step, what we want to do, is create a category. So I'm going to go back to Manage > Column Organization. Since that term paper is an assignment, I click on assignment. I'm going to click on Submit. So, now that we've got every score column categorized, dropping scores and weighting scores is going to be a snap.
Create a Rubric for Grading Student Work. Provide Student Feedback. Pedagogy: Providing Effective Feedback. Rubrics. Grade Using a Rubric. Viewing Student Results and Question Item Analysis. Changing the Default Letter-grading Schema. Dropping Scores in the Grade Center. How to Grade Student Collaboration Inline. Viewing Grade Histories. Regrading Tests. Use Grade Details to See Attempts and Assign Grades. Anonymous and Delegated Grading.
Viewing the student results and question item analysis. Running a Grade Center Report. Create a Report.