Assessments

How do I use the Online Gradebook in the Assessment area?

The Bb gradebook posts all student grades associated with assessments. When you make an assessment available, an item is created automatically in the gradebook. As students take the assessment, Blackboard records their grade in the Gradebook.

When a short answer/essay question has been included in an assessment, a red exclamation point will show instead of a grade for students who have taken the assessment. The exclamation point indicates that the assessment has not been entirely graded. Click on the exclamation point to manually read the student's essay question answer and assign a grade to it. Then the student's number grade will show in the gradebook.

To access the Bb gradebook, click Online Gradebook from the Assessment area of the Control Panel for your course. You may then choose to view a:

Report by User: lets you see and edit all the grades for a specific student. Also, you may click on the student's e-mail address to send a e-mail message.
Report by Item: lets you see and edit students' grades for a specific quiz. Also, you may view the detailed analysis which will show the percentages of the students' responses to each question.
Spreadsheet: lets you see a "spreadsheet" view of all grades for all students. See below for more detail.
Export Spreadsheet: lets you create a file (comma-delimited text file) that you may bring into MS Excel or other spreadsheet application. It is recommended that you perform this feature often as a disaster recovery measure.

From the Spreadsheet view, you can view grades, edit grades, and even create new gradebook entries (for classroom-based items such as research papers, oral reports, class participation, etc.). You may sort the items in any order you wish (see the Sort Items By: in the upper-left corner); you may "filter" the data shown in the spreadsheet (e.g. show users whose last name begins with a particular letter of the alphabet). The student's names are clickable, showing the "Report by User" screen; likewise, the item names are also clickable, showing the "Report by Item" screen. To add an item for classroom-based assignments (such as book reports, attendance, etc.), simply click on the Add Item button above the spreadsheet.

The number grades shown in this view of the gradebook are clickable. When you click on a quiz grade, you will see the student's attempt at taking the quiz and how they answered the questions; you may then modify the points given for any and all questions. Also, there is a "Clear Attempt" button in the upper right corner where you may clear the student's attempt at taking the quiz (afterwards, you should advise the student to take the quiz again).

To clarify, a dash for an Assessment item is not clickable and means that the student has not yet attempted to take the assessment. A dash for a classroom-based item means that you have not yet assigned a grade for this person, and you may click on the dash to do so.

In addition, instructors can set a weight for each gradebook item to determine a final grade. For example, a final exam may be worth 25 percent of a student's grade while a reading quiz or book report may be worth only 10 percent.

WARNING: the Adjust Gradebook Weights page lists the points possible for each item, and Bb assumes that each item has the same points possible. If items have different points possible (for example, a quiz may have 20 points possible and a test may have 100 points possible), weighting them will not give an accurate measure of student performance. Therefore, if you set Weights, all items should have the same number of possible points.

To set weights, click Weight Grades from the Gradebook spreadsheet view to access the Adjust Gradebook Weights page. Then, enter a percentage of the final grade for each item. The percentages may equal less than 100 percent, to allow for the addition of new gradebook items later. The percentages may not exceed 100 percent total.