Grade Center

The Grade Center in Blackboard is a place for instructors to track student performance. The Grade Center can calculate grades, organize student-submitted assignment documents, record the last time each student accessed the course and include point-and-click rubrics that can be used to facilitate scoring of assignments.

The Grade Center is customizable. Instructors can select which grades are displayed to students on their My Grades page, supply feedback to the students, create weighted columns and exclude certain assessments from final score calculations. Faculty can create grade columns for any graded activities they want to record such as projects, class participation or attendance.

There are several grading tasks such as assigning, calculating, curving and providing extra credit that are available within the Blackboard Grade Center.

Students can benefit from seeing grade progress or instructor feedback and, if necessary, adjust their approach to learning to improve performance. NOTE: Students can access their own, individual grades from the “My Grades” page. Instructions for adding a My Grades button to the course menu are below.

Blackboard Annotate

You can use Blackboard Annotate for inline grading in your courses. Blackboard Annotate offers a more robust feature set to provide customizable feedback to students. Features include a sidebar summary view, freehand drawing tools, various color selections, and much more.

The My Grades page allows students to view posted grades and the status of gradable items. When a student accesses My Grades via the Global Navigation menu they see grade information from all courses in one location. My Grades may include item names, details, due dates, student and instructor dates of activity, posted grades, points possible, links to rubrics used for grading and instructor's comments about the items.

As an instructor you will not see any information if you click on My Grades in a course, just the message "Users with your role do not have personal grades". Instructors can use Student Preview mode to access My Grades and see the student view of grades in their course.

There are three ways for students to access the My Grades page: From inside a course 1) click My Grades on the left course menu, 2) click Student Tools on the course menu then My Grades. To see grades for all courses 3) access the Blackboard Global Navigation Menu (click your name in the upper right) and click the My Grades icon.

You can also view the Check your Grades video to provide information to your students about accessing their grades.

Smart Views

A smart view is a focused look at the Grade Center that shows only the columns that match a set of criteria. The view is saved for continued use. When the Grade Center includes a great number of students and columns, you can use smart views to quickly find data. Several smart views are available by default, but you can also create your own. With smart views, you can view the progress of these items:

An existing group
Student performance for a particular item
Individual students
Category and status of items
Custom combination of attributes

Example: Tracking low scores - You create a smart view to track students with low scores to quickly see which students need help. You can email these students from the Grade Center.

Example: Assessment comparison - You create a smart view to display only two columns in the Grade Center grid: a calculated total column for tests and a calculated total column for assignments. You can compare the two columns to gauge how students are performing.

You can also view the How to Create a Smart View video for information on Creating Smart Views in your Grade Center.

Work Offline

To eliminate potential double entry of Grade Center data, you can perform offline grading and import grades into the Grade Center. You can also upload grades from external sources such as a spreadsheet or a comma-separated values (CSV) file. You must format data specifically to upload correctly and to synchronize with existing Grade Center data.

You can also view the Work Offline with Grade Center Data video for more information.

Attendance

Many instructors use attendance data as part of their students' overall grades.

For each class meeting, you can mark whether a student is present, late, absent, or excused. The attendance records for each student appear in a single column next to other grades. On the Attendance page, profile pictures appear so you can easily identify students.

You can use attendance as part of grade calculations just as you can for an assignment grade column.

You can also view the Mark Attendance video for more information.

Grade History, Reports and Statistics

On the Grade History page, you can view all grade actions within a course and export the information. You can view all the data for grade submissions for the course within a set date range.

Access the Grade History page from the Reports menu in the Grade Center. Visit Blackboard's Grade History page to find out more.

You can create printable reports for your courses and students. You can also create a progress report that contains grades from a particular grading period for a defined group of students in a class. You can only choose students within one section to appear in a report. You must run a separate report for each section.

Based on your version of Blackboard Learn, when students submit assignments successfully, they may receive confirmation numbers. If available, you can view the confirmation numbers for all student submissions from the Grade Center.

You can customize reports. You can include report header and footer information, a signature line, date, and course information.

When you print, only one student per page is allowed.

Blackboard/Campus Connection Grade Import

Blackboard/Campus Connection Grade Import allow the instructor of record to import term-based final grades from their Blackboard course(s) directly into Campus Connection. The option provides a one-way transfer of data and will help to ensure a secure and accurate recording of grades from Blackboard to Campus Connection.

All Blackboard Original course sites have a grade column added to the Grade Center titled "CC Final Grade". This column has been pre-configured to be the default grade column to be used with the Campus Connection grade import. This column is not required to be used.

For Blackboard Ultra courses, the "Overall Grade" column is what is used as the Campus Connection grade import column. This column has been added to Ultra courses as the default grade column. Instructors can change the schema for the Overall Grade column as needed.

Note: To import grades from a merged course (a course comprising multiple sections), you must process each of its constituent child sections separately.