Center for Teaching and Learning
Faculty Learn Ultra Grading
Grading provides Instructors with the tools to evaluate student work and deliver constructive feedback. You'll discover how to efficiently access student submissions, assign grades, leverage rubrics for consistent evaluation, and effectively manage your gradebook. From straightforward assignments to complex tests and participation tracking, these functionalities ensure transparency in assessment and foster student development throughout the learning journey. Blackboard Learn Ultra streamlines the grading process, allowing you to focus more on guiding your students towards success.
The Gradebook page provides a centralized hub to view all coursework and enrolled students, streamlining the assessment process. Instructors can easily customize the gradebook's appearance and organization to suit their needs. Valuable features include the ability to search for specific student submissions, ensuring no assignment goes unnoticed. Furthermore, the option to upload and download grades offers flexibility for data analysis and external record-keeping, making assessment management more accessible and adaptable.
The Gradebook's Overview tab in Blackboard Learn Ultra offers instructors a clear, organized dashboard for managing assessments and student submissions. The "Needs reconciling" section is crucial for parallel grading workflows, highlighting submissions that require your final review and approval after peer grading. Once you select "Reconcile now," you can examine feedback and grades provided by others before assigning the final score. The "Needs grading" section prioritizes your workload, displaying ungraded submissions with the oldest ones appearing first, ensuring timely feedback. Upon selecting "Grade now," you can directly access and evaluate student work. Finally, the "Needs posting" area allows for efficient release of graded assessments; a simple "Post now" action makes the grades visible to students.
Open the Overview Tab in Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
The Gradable Items tab within your Gradebook provides a comprehensive overview of all elements contributing to your course's final grade. This view allows Instructors to quickly see essential information like due dates for assignments and tests, the current grading status of each item (e.g., graded, not graded, in progress), and how items are categorized within your syllabus. Beyond mere observation, the Gradable Items tab empowers you to directly post grades for individual items and meticulously adjust the overall grade calculation for the course, ensuring accurate and transparent assessment management.
Open the Gradable Items Tab in Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
The Grades tab in the Gradebook provides Instructors with a clear, organized overview of student performance. Each row represents a student, and each column a gradable item, allowing for quick identification of individual scores. The intuitive design includes arrow buttons for sorting columns, enabling instructors to easily analyze trends and identify students who may need additional support or those who are excelling.
Open the Grades Tab in Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
The Gradebook's "Students" tab offers a centralized hub for instructors to monitor student progress. This view prominently displays each student's name, their last access date to the course, and their overall grade, provided an overall grade has been configured. This immediate overview allows Instructors to quickly identify students who may be falling behind or are no longer actively engaging with the course material. Furthermore, a distinct purple flag visually alerts instructors to students who have been granted grading accommodations, ensuring these individuals receive appropriate support and consideration throughout the grading process.
Open the Students Tab in Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
When you create any gradable item – whether it's an assignment, quiz, or discussion post – it's automatically placed into a designated grade category within your course's gradebook. This organization is essential for effective management and a clear overview of student performance. Furthermore, Grade Categories are not just for basic organization; they are the foundation for creating powerful calculated items. For instance, you can easily set up weighted categories to automatically compute an assignments average or a final course grade based on the performance within each category. This streamlines the grading process and provides immediate insights into student progress.
Open the Grade Categories tutorial to learn more.
Grade columns offer Instructors a streamlined way to manage and present student performance. These columns display grades for all course activities, including automatically generated ones for online submissions like tests and assignments. For offline activities or specific assessments, instructors can manually create columns. The Overall Grade column provides a comprehensive view of the final course grade, calculated through various methods. Additionally, dedicated columns exist for Attendance and Total Calculations, which can offer alternative perspectives to the Overall Grade, often displaying results in points and percentages for student clarity. Custom Calculation columns allow for detailed breakdowns based on selected coursework.
The Overall Grade column offers a clear and immediate view of student performance. This dynamic column automatically calculates and displays a running total of all graded assignments and activities that contribute to a student's final course grade. Positioned conveniently alongside student names in the gradebook, it allows educators to swiftly identify trends, pinpoint students who may need additional support, and track overall class progress. This feature simplifies grade management and provides actionable insights, empowering instructors to make timely interventions and ensure student success.
Open the Overall Grade Column tutorial to learn more.
The Gradable Items column offers Instructors a streamlined way to manage assessments. When a gradable item, such as an assignment or test, is created, a corresponding column automatically appears in the gradebook. This ensures all graded work is accounted for and easily accessible. The "Gradable Items" view provides a visual representation of these columns, allowing instructors to intuitively rearrange their order simply by dragging and dropping. This drag-and-drop functionality enhances organizational flexibility, enabling instructors to arrange their gradebook in a way that best suits their workflow and reporting needs.
Open the Gradable Items Column tutorial to learn more.
The Total Calculation column offers instructors two powerful methods for grading: Weighted and Points. The Weighted method allows you to assign percentage values to individual grade items and categories, ensuring they contribute proportionally to a final grade of 100%. This provides flexibility in how you distribute the importance of different assignments. Alternatively, the Points method enhances transparency by showcasing to students the actual point value of each assessment. By selecting specific categories and items, you determine the maximum possible points for the course, clearly indicating the relative weight of each component for learners.
Open the Total Calculation Column tutorial to learn more.
The Calculation column empowers Instructors to create dynamic gradebook insights. By leveraging arithmetic operations and grouping, you can build custom formulas that go beyond simple numerical entries. Imagine automatically calculating a student's average assignment score, or their highest quiz grade, directly within the gradebook. This feature allows for the inclusion of various gradebook elements like categories, individual assignments, and even other existing calculations. This flexibility ensures you can provide students with a comprehensive and immediate understanding of their performance across different assessment types, enhancing transparency and their ability to track progress.
Open the Calculation Column tutorial to learn more.
Rubrics serve as scoring guides, breaking down assignments into assessable criteria and defining expectations at various achievement levels. This transparency empowers students to understand your grading standards and focus their efforts effectively. Instructors can create four types of rubrics: percentage, percentage range, points, and points range, and can associate them with assignments, discussions, and journals. With unlimited rows and columns to define criteria and achievement levels, you can build detailed rubrics, ensuring fair and consistent evaluation of student work.
There are five distinct types of rubric creation to suit various assessment needs. Percentage-based rubrics assign a specific percentage of the total grade to each criterion, while percentage-range rubrics allow for a flexible grading window. For more precise scoring, points-based rubrics assign a fixed point value to each level of achievement. Alternatively, points-range rubrics provide a graded spectrum within a defined point range. Finally, no-points rubrics are ideal for providing qualitative feedback without impacting the numerical grade, making them valuable for formative assessments.
Open the Types of Rubrics tutorial to learn more.
Blackboard Learn Ultra simplifies rubric creation for Instructors. When grading an assignment, discussion, or journal, access the Settings panel via the Settings button. Scroll to find "Additional Tools" and select "Add grading rubric," followed by "Create New Rubric." Alternatively, rubrics can be generated directly from the gradebook. Click the Settings button in your gradebook and choose "Create" within the "Course Rubrics" section.
Open the Create or Generate Rubrics tutorial to learn more.
After grading with a rubric, you'll find it becomes locked, preventing further edits. This ensures the integrity of past assessments. However, to make changes for future assignments, simply create a copy of the existing rubric. This copy can then be freely edited and renamed to suit your new requirements. To access your rubrics, navigate to your Gradebook. Click the Settings icon, which opens the Gradebook Settings panel. Scroll down to locate the Course Rubrics section, where your rubrics, including the copy you've made, will be available.
Open the Manage Rubrics tutorial to learn more.
By associating an existing rubric, you can provide clear grading criteria and feedback to students. This feature is available for assignments, discussions, and journals, but it's important to note that a rubric can only be added before any grading has commenced on the item and only one rubric can be linked per assessment. To do this, simply navigate to the assessment page, click the Settings icon to open the panel, and then locate the "Additional Tools" section. From there, select "Add grading rubric" to begin the association process.
Open the Associate a Rubric to an Assessment tutorial to learn more.
Grading schemas are instrumental in translating raw scores into meaningful grade representations, appearing in the Gradebook and on assessment Submission pages. A grading schema functions by comparing a student's earned points against the total possible points for an assignment, calculating a percentage. This percentage is then mapped to a predetermined range, yielding a final grade such as a letter grade (A, B, C) or a simple Pass/Fail designation. Blackboard provides several default schemas, including Points, Percentage, Complete/Incomplete, and Letter, allowing instructors to choose the most suitable method for their course.
Open the Grading Schemas tutorial to learn more.
Tests are designed to accommodate a wide range of question formats, allowing Instructors to gauge learning in diverse ways, from simple multiple-choice checks to more complex essay or matching exercises. From initial setup to final grade review, you'll find guidance on fine-tuning test parameters, ensuring secure and timely access for students, and efficiently analyzing their performance to inform future instruction and support student success.
Open the Accommodations tutorial to learn more.
Blackboard offers instructors flexible options for awarding extra credit, enhancing grading accuracy and student motivation. You can directly apply extra credit to a student's "Overall Grade" column, providing a simple boost without needing to associate it with a specific assignment. Alternatively, if you utilize weighted grading categories, you can assign extra credit within those categories. This allows for more nuanced adjustments, enabling you to reward exceptional work or compensate for specific challenges while maintaining the integrity of your overall grading structure. Both methods ensure that extra credit is easily managed and clearly reflected for students.
To implement extra credit in Blackboard, Instructors can leverage a specific Gradebook setup. Create a new Gradebook column designated for extra credit. Crucially, set the "Maximum Score" for this column to zero (0). This seemingly counterintuitive step ensures that students don't accrue points that could negatively impact their overall score if they miss this extra credit opportunity. Then, as students earn extra credit, manually enter those points into this column. Because the maximum is 0, any positive points entered will effectively add to their total score, contributing to their overall grade calculation without affecting the weighting of other assignments. This method is ideal for a single, ungraded extra credit assignment where points are simply added on.
Open the Extra Credit in Overall Grade Column tutorial to learn more.
Blackboard allows Instructors to implement extra credit within weighted grade calculations. When setting up a weighted total, Instructors have the flexibility to add extra credit either at the category level or to the overall grade. This distinction is crucial, as it directly influences how the bonus points affect student performance. Adding extra credit to a specific category will only impact that particular section of the course's grading scheme. Conversely, assigning extra credit to the overall grade will distribute its effect across all graded items in the course.
Open the Extra Credit when Weighting Grades tutorial to learn more.
Delegated Grading allows you to efficiently distribute the grading workload by assigning specific users within your course, such as teaching assistants or fellow Instructors, to assess particular sets of student assignment submissions. These designated individuals are known as delegated graders. They follow the familiar grading process within Ultra but are restricted to evaluating only the assignment attempts that have been specifically assigned to them, providing provisional grades that ultimately contribute to the final assessment.
Open the Delegated Grading tutorial to learn more.
The anonymous grading feature provides Instructors with a fair and unbiased evaluation. By masking student identities during the grading workflow, instructors can concentrate on the merit of the work itself, free from any preconceived notions or personal awareness of who submitted it. This ensures that every assignment is judged on its own strengths and weaknesses, fostering a more equitable learning environment. Ultimately, anonymous grading in Ultra supports a more objective and transparent assessment process, benefiting both students and Instructors.
The Anonymous Grading feature shields student identities, effectively mitigating unconscious bias by hiding names until after grades are posted. To activate it, navigate to the settings panel for your tests and assessments and select the "Hide student names" option. It's important to note that currently, anonymous grading is compatible with assignments and tests that do not utilize Blackboard's built-in question types. You can, however, incorporate text and file submissions within these anonymously graded assessments. This functionality, alongside features like class conversations, offline submissions, and group assignments, enhances the overall flexibility and fairness of the Blackboard Learn Ultra platform.
Open the Enable Anonymous Grading tutorial to learn more.
From the "Submissions" page, instructors can initiate anonymous grading with a clear notification. Student names and profile pictures are masked, replaced by generic identifiers like "Anonymous Student 244260," ensuring impartiality. Submissions are randomized, preventing bias from submission order. This feature also allows viewing and sorting submissions by grade, facilitating the review of borderline assignments before final grade posting, thus promoting fairness and accuracy in evaluation.
Open the Grade Anonymously tutorial to learn more.
Beyond simply tracking tardiness, attendance data plays a vital role in calculating student grades, fulfilling institutional attendance policies, and ensuring compliance with visa requirements for international students. Furthermore, accurate attendance records are essential for institutions seeking to demonstrate "seat time" for federal funding and accreditation, and they are a key indicator in efforts to improve student retention and success. Blackboard empowers Instructors to efficiently gather and utilize this important information.
To set up Attendance in your Blackboard Learn gradebook, navigate to "Mark attendance" from the Course Content page. Select "Add Attendance" and configure the settings. You can adjust grade display and late policies, and choose to include excused absences. Save your changes to reflect them in the gradebook.
Open the Set Up Attendance in Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
The Attendance tool helps faculty manage student presence. Access it via the Attendance page, defaulting to the current day's "Meeting" view. "Overall" view offers course statistics and the ability to edit attendance for past or future meetings. Mark attendance in the "Meeting" view, where actions like marking all present or absent are available. Changes are saved automatically and immediately visible to students, updating their attendance grades accordingly.
Open the Manage Attendance tutorial to learn more.
Access attendance directly from the Gradebook's item or grid view. The attendance column automatically populates within the Attendance category, allowing you to integrate it into grade calculations and see participation at a glance. Mark attendance by selecting it in list view, or edit it via the column header in grid view.
Open the View Attendance and Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
Faculty can export attendance data from the Overall view. Simply select the Export icon to download a CSV file containing student attendance records. The download starts automatically without any confirmation prompt.
Open the Attendance Data tutorial to learn more.
Access student submissions, whether for automatically scored quizzes or manually reviewed essays. You'll learn to leverage tools like rubrics and point values to consistently apply grades, providing clear expectations and objective evaluation. Discover effective methods for delivering constructive feedback that fosters student learning and growth. By mastering these assessment grading workflows, instructors can achieve clarity and consistency, making the feedback loop a powerful educational asset.
Blackboard offers Instructors multiple convenient entry points for accessing student submissions for grading. Whether you prefer a streamlined overview or a specific assignment focus, the system caters to your workflow. You can initiate grading directly from the Activity Stream, which highlights recent student activity. Alternatively, the base navigation menu provides a comprehensive list of courses and their associated content. For a targeted approach, navigate directly to a specific assignment to view all submitted work. The Gradebook also allows you to access submissions by clicking on individual student grades. Finally, the dedicated Submissions page offers a centralized location to manage and review all submitted assignments across your courses.
Open the Access Submissions to Grade tutorial to learn more.
The Attempt Logs provide a detailed history of student interactions with an assessment, helping to confirm technical issues encountered during testing and identify potential academic dishonesty. Available for both named and anonymous assessments, the report's access for anonymous tests is activated after grades are posted and anonymity is removed. For tests, the logs offer crucial data like start times, answer submission timestamps, question-specific details including time spent, submission receipts, and final grades, allowing instructors to effectively track and analyze student attempts.
Open the Attempt Logs tutorial to learn more.
Bb Annotate allows for in-line, customizable feedback directly on student submissions. Imagine effortlessly highlighting key points, adding detailed comments in various colors, and even utilizing freehand drawing for visual explanations. The sidebar summary view keeps your feedback organized, ensuring a comprehensive and impactful assessment. With Bb Annotate, providing students with clear, actionable feedback becomes a streamlined and more engaging process, ultimately fostering better learning outcomes.
Open the Bb Annotate tutorial to learn more.
By associating a rubric with an assessment, journal, or discussion, you can efficiently evaluate student work directly within the platform. The rubric becomes visible on the graded item's page, providing clear criteria for both instructor and student. While you can only attach one rubric per item, and unfortunately, rubrics cannot be used with assignments containing questions, this feature significantly enhances the grading process. Crucially, to ensure accurate status updates, it is recommended to grade using the rubric. Overriding the rubric grade by entering a score manually will prevent the submission from being marked as Graded and will leave it in a "Needs Grading" state.
Open the Grade with Rubrics tutorial to learn more.
Flexible grading allows you to personalize your grading style, ensuring you can work in the way that best suits your needs. Easily visualize your grading progress, enabling you to prioritize tasks and allocate your time effectively. Deliver rich, multimedia feedback directly within the assessment interface, fostering deeper student understanding. Furthermore, flexible grading seamlessly integrates essential tools like rubrics and anti-plagiarism checkers, streamlining the entire grading process and enhancing the quality of feedback you provide.
Open the Grade Assessments With Flexible Grading tutorial to learn more.
Once your student groups submit their work, you can easily access it directly from the gradebook or by navigating within your course. A key feature is the flexibility to assign a uniform grade to the entire group, acknowledging their collective effort. Alternatively, if you observe disparities in individual contributions, Ultra allows you to grade each team member's specific input separately, ensuring fairer assessment. However, it's crucial to remember that once you've initiated the grading process, you won't be able to alter grade settings or adjust group memberships, so be sure to confirm these details beforehand.
Open the Grade Group Assignments tutorial to learn more.
By enabling grading for a journal, you transform it into a valuable assessment tool, automatically creating a dedicated column in your gradebook. This incentivizes students to thoughtfully craft their posts. To set this up, simply access the Journal Settings by clicking the gear icon. Within the settings panel, select the "Grade Journal" option. This action unlocks further customization, allowing you to define crucial elements like the assignment's due date and set a maximum point value, ensuring clear expectations and facilitating efficient grading.
Open the Grade Journals tutorial to learn more.
To encourage students to engage meaningfully in online discussions, Blackboard offers Instructors the ability to assign a grade. This feature incentivizes thoughtful contributions and active participation. To enable grading, simply access the discussion's settings by clicking the Discussion Settings icon. Within the "Details & Information" section, you'll find the "Grade discussion" option. Activating this will reveal further settings, including a due date and the maximum points achievable for student posts. Crucially, the maximum points can be applied to either a single post or multiple posts from a student. Once grading is activated for a discussion, Blackboard automatically generates a corresponding grade column within the Gradebook for easy tracking and management.
Open the Grade Discussions tutorial to learn more.
The Grade Multiple Attempts feature is a valuable tool for improving student success and retention. By allowing students to submit revised work, instructors encourage them to refine their understanding and elevate the quality of their submissions. For assignments, this translates to students being able to submit drafts, receive feedback, and then resubmit to earn credit for demonstrable improvement. It's crucial for instructors to clearly communicate which assessments permit multiple attempts, along with explicit expectations and grading policies for each submission, ensuring students can effectively leverage this opportunity.
Open the Grade Multiple Attempts tutorial to learn more.
The Override Grade feature, provides Instructors with control over a student's final grade, particularly in courses allowing multiple attempts. It's crucial to understand that overrides apply solely to the final overall grade, not to individual attempt scores. Once an override is applied, it takes precedence over all subsequent gradings, including any attempts a student might submit afterward. This means if you manually change a final grade and then later regrade a question or an attempt, the override remains. For a clean override, it's often best to wait until all attempts are completed or the due date has passed before implementing it. To initiate an override, simply locate the menu next to the final grade and follow the prompts.
Open the Override Grades tutorial to learn more.
When unexpected circumstances arise, such as illness or personal emergencies, Instructors can grant exceptions and exemptions. This might involve extending a deadline for an assignment, providing a student with an additional attempt at a quiz, or even excusing them from an assessment if the situation warrants. These tools ensure fairness and support students through challenging times, allowing them to demonstrate their learning effectively without undue hardship.
Open the Grant Exceptions and Exemptions tutorial to learn more.
After a student submits an assignment or test, a confirmation window appears, displaying a unique submission receipt number. Students can download this receipt directly and also receive it via email, encouraging them to retain it as proof of submission. For instructors, this feature allows them to easily look up and review submission receipt confirmation numbers for each student attempt. The detailed information on these receipts, including course and assessment details, student name, grade, file size, and a precise timestamp (noting any lateness), offers a comprehensive overview of the submission process and aids in verification. The auto-submit indicator is also clearly displayed when applicable.
Open the Submission Receipts tutorial to learn more.
You have the flexibility to post grades directly from several key areas within the interface. The base navigation Grades page provides a comprehensive overview, allowing you to select and post grades for multiple assignments at once. Alternatively, the Gradable items view in the Gradebook offers a focused perspective, ideal for posting grades for individual assignments or specific gradable items. Finally, for a granular approach, you can post grades directly from the Submissions page, where you can review and grade individual student work and then post the respective grade. This multi-pronged approach ensures you can manage and communicate student performance effectively.
Open the Post Grades tutorial to learn more.
You can download the entire gradebook or specific columns from your courses, allowing you to utilize external applications like Microsoft Excel for comprehensive statistical analysis or detailed grade review. This functionality extends beyond simple viewing; Instructors can make modifications to grades within these external programs and then seamlessly re-upload the updated data back into Blackboard Learn Ultra, ensuring efficient management and accuracy of student assessments.
Instructors to easily download grades from their gradebook for record-keeping and analysis. From the main gradebook view, simply select the "Download" option. This action reveals a panel where you can customize your download. You have the flexibility to download the entire gradebook, specific selected items, or even the grade history. Choose your preferred file format, either a comma-delimited (CSV) or tab-delimited (XLS) data file. Finally, decide where to save the downloaded file, whether directly to your device or to a folder within the Content Collection, and then click "Download." Please note that items with anonymous grading, dual graders, or peer review cannot be included in the downloaded file.
Open the Download Grades from Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
The Grade History feature in Blackboard offers an audit trail for Instructors and administrators. This functionality allows you to meticulously track every alteration made to student grades within a course. This is invaluable for maintaining academic integrity, as it provides a clear record for resolving potential student inquiries or challenges regarding their marks. By downloading these grade history records directly from the gradebook, you gain a transparent and accountable overview of grade changes, ensuring a fair and accurate assessment process.
Open the Download Grade History tutorial to learn more.
Manage grades by allowing file uploads directly to the gradebook. This feature is invaluable for those who prefer offline grade calculation or have existing grade spreadsheets. To utilize this functionality, navigate to your gradebook and select the "Upload" option. This will reveal a panel for uploading your grade file. For seamless integration, it's highly recommended to first download the existing gradebook. This downloaded file serves as a precise template, ensuring your uploaded data aligns perfectly with the required format, thus preventing errors and facilitating a smooth update of your students' scores.
Open the Upload a File to Gradebook tutorial to learn more.
Contact Us
- Center for Teaching & Learning
- Governors State University - C Building
- 708-534-4115
- blackboard@govst.edu