Grading
Use Blackboard Ultra to grade student work and provide meaningful feedback!
Rubrics | SafeAssign | Gradebook | Setup Grading | Grading Analytics | Campus Connection Grade Import
Consult Blackboard Ultra's repository of help articles on the Gradebook. Learn how to access the gradebook, update settings, and set student accommodations. Find help on adding gradable items, taking attendance, downloading results and submissions, and viewing graded item statistics.
Rubrics
Instructors can create and use rubrics in Blackboard Ultra to support consistent and transparent grading. Rubrics establish clear evaluation criteria and performance levels, helping instructors communicate expectations for student work. For this reason, instructors are encouraged to make rubrics visible in advance. Furthermore, instructors can attach their created rubrics to assessments to be used during the grading process. Note: Only one rubric can be associated with each assessment.
For more information on using rubrics to grade Blackboard assessments, see the Rubrics help article.
SafeAssign
Instructors can use SafeAssign to check submitted assignments for originality. SafeAssign compares student submissions against a database of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works. Turn on SafeAssign in Blackboard Ultra to ensure the originality of your student's assessments!
For more information, see UND's SafeAssign Knowledge Base article or Blackboard's repository of help articles on SafeAssign.
Gradebook
Navigate the Gradebook to access grading tasks, grades, and student information.
- Overview Tab: view grading tasks that need to be graded, reconciled, or posted.
- Gradable Items Tab: view all gradable items, including due dates, status, and categories.
- Grades Tab: view individual student grades by item in a row-and-column layout.
- Students Tab: view overall course grades and student accommodations.
Setup Grading
Create grade categories for items in you gradebook. This simplifies grade calculations, such as category and weighted averages.
Instructors can control which columns appear in their Grades tab. Display default columns, like overall grade, gradable items, and attendance grades. Instructors can also add calculation columns for total and overall grade calculations.
Customize how grades are displayed in the gradebook using Grading Schemas. Instructors may choose from the following display options:
- Points
- Percentages
- Pass/Fail (Complete/Incomplete)
- Letter grades (A, B, C, D)
Set specific accommodations for students in Blackboard Ultra. This allows instructors to grade items with ease, as accommodations are applied directly to assessments and are reflected automatically in grading.
Grading Analytics
Grade History
Grade history allows instructors to track changes made to grades in a course for audit and review purposes. These records provide an audit trail that can help address student questions, grade disputes, and grading accuracy concerns. Grade history can be downloaded directly from the Gradebook.
See the Download Grade History help article for more information and instructions.
Question Analysis
Review question analytics in Blackboard Ultra. Question analytics help instructors evaluate the effectiveness of assessment questions. With question analytics, instructors can run reports on specific assessments. See the average score and average time spent on each question. Then, Blackboard Ultra will assign a quality rating of good, fair, or poor for questions. These insights can help instructors refine questions to improve future assessments.
Blackboard/Campus Connection Grade Import
The Blackboard/Campus Connection Grade Import now works in Ultra courses.
Blackboard/Campus Connection Grade Import allows 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, which can help ensure a secure and accurate recording of grades from Blackboard to Campus Connection.
The Overall Grade column is what is used to pull data from Blackboard to Campus Connection. 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.