Blackboard Grade Center Setup

The Blackboard Grade Center can be a very effective tool in keeping both you and your students up-to-date on their performance. 

Blackboard’s Grade Center can be used to calculate a running total for each student's final grade, regardless if you use Blackboard to deliver assignments, assessments and other grade-able activities, or just manually enter grades into manually created columns. By providing this information to students, they will know where they stand in your course at any point in the semester. This transparency will allow both you and your students to devote more resources to the tasks that demand your time.

What We Need To start, we need a copy of a syllabus…specially, the course grading section of the syllabus. Below is an example we will be working from:

Initial Setup - (This is done only once)

Setup your categories

1. Go to your course2. Click Grade Center3. Click Full Grade Center

4. Move your mouse over Manage5. Click Categories

We are now going to create categories that match the items listed from the syllabus. We are going to use the example I posted above.

6. Click Create Category

7. Type of the Name of your category (i.e. Attendance and Participation)

8. Click Submit

Repeat these steps until you have created categories for each item on the syllabus

All the categories entered will now appear in your category list. User created categories will have a checkbox in front on the name and a chevron after it. These are used to delete (checkbox) or edit (chevron) your category if needed.

10. Click OK (bottom right hand corner) to finalize your categories

Now that all the categories have been entered into Blackboard, we next need to assign weights to those categories. These are the same weights that appear on the syllabus for each of the assessment items. By assigning weights to each category, Blackboard will know how much, individual items belonging to that category, weight against the final course grade.

By default, a Weighted Total column already exists in a Blackboard course. We are going to edit this column instead of creating a new one.

11. Click the chevron for the column Weighted Total12. Click Edit Column Information

Scroll down the page until you find the SELECT COLUMNS section.

13. Highlight the categories you created from the Categories to Select box and bring them over the Selected Columns box. Use the bottom arrow to move the selected categories over.

Once the categories have been moved, they will need to be assigned their weights.

14. Click in the box for a category15. Type the weight for that category

Use the scroll bar on the right to access all the categories. As you enter the weights, you will notice Total Weight on the bottom change. If everything is correct, Total Weight should equal 100% after all the weights have been entered.

If the Total Weight is not correct, check to make sure you have all your categories brought over and/or the assigned weight is correct.

Note: After the last weight is entered, click outside of the Selected Columns box to have the last weight recognized. Failure in doing this may give you an incorrect Total Weight score.

16. Click Submit to save everything

Thats it! The initial setup is complete!

As mentioned at the start of the section, the steps above are done only once.

Appendix A will go over how to create columns, for those assessment items NOT automatically created by Blackboard, and how to properly set them up.

Appendix B will go over how to change the category for a column that was automatically created by Blackboard.

Supplemental will contain some extra information.

Appendix A:

Creating Columns and Assigning a Category (tagging)

For assessment items where Blackboard will not create a column in the Grade Center (i.e. Attendance and Participation), you will need to create the column and tag it with the proper category.

1. Go to your course2. Click Grade Center3. Click Full Grade Center

4. Click Create Column

5. Enter a name for the column6. Change the category to match the column you are are creating 7. Assign Points*

Note*: I would always recommend that an individual assessment item be worth 100 points. This point value does not affect the weights we setup earlier and seems to be the easiest for students to understand. (i.e. 90 points out of 100 = 90%)

8. Click Submit

After clicking Submit, you should see your new column in your Grade Center.

Now repeat steps 4 - 8 for the remaining columns that you need to create.

Remember…the most important part in creating these columns is to assign the proper category to it. If you don’t tag your category properly, the Weighted Total Column, we configured earlier, will not include the column in its calculations.

Appendix B:

Changing Category for Columns Created by Blackboard

Blackboard assessment items (Test, Journals, Discussion Boards, Assignments, and more) will automatically create a column in the Grade Center for you.

However, the category for these items will default to the assessment itself For example, an Assignment created for the submission of work called Short Paper #1 will have a default category of Assignment.

Using our syllabus’s Course Grading we do not have an Assignment category, but a Short Papers category. Luckily, we can easily change this.

1. Go to your course2. Click Grade Center3. Click Full Grade Center

4. Move your mouse over Manage5. Click Column Organization

Scan to the section labeled Not in a Grading Period

As you can see, Short Paper #1 belongs to the category Assignment and not its proper category (for our Grade Center setup) of Short Papers

If we leave this as is, the Weighted Total column will not include this column in its calculations. Lets change it.

6. Click the box in front of Short Paper #1

7. Click the Change Category to… button8. Select the proper category

Now you can see our Short Paper #1 is properly assigned to the Short Papers category and will now be included in the Weight Total calculations.

9. Click Submit to save the changes

Whenever you need to change a columns category, you can repeat steps 6 - 9 as outlined above.

Supplemental: Column Organization is a great way to get a “birds-eye” view of your Grade Center to make sure everything looks right.

From this view you can:

• Change column category• Rearrange column order• Check Point Possible assigned to columns• Show/Hide a column• Delete a column• Check the column creation date• Determine if a column has a Due Date