Blackboard Grading Tips

These tips can help instructors utilize Blackboard's Grade Center features more effectively to make their time online more efficient.

Use rubrics: Rubrics can help you more effectively grade and help students understand assignment expectations and grading decisions.

Set up your Grade Schema: It's easy to enter your own grading schema and not have to rely on Blackboard's default schema.

Instructions for setting up your Grade Schema
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Utilize the total columns correctly: Understanding the way the total columns work in Blackboard may solve many grade book issues.

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Have your students submit Word documents to grade inline: This feature saves time by not requiring instructors to download and upload papers in order to add comments to student submissions.

Instructions for inline grading

Grade essay and short answer test questions by question:

Instructions for grading essay and short answer questions
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Reorder columns to quickly give zeros: To make adding zeros to your gradebook easier, click on the title of the column in your gradebook. This will sort the grades in ascending or descending order (click on it again to switch the sort order). Then you can quickly add zeros without having to skip over students who have completed the assignment.

Instructions for reordering columns
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Hide dropped students:

Hiding and Showing columns: Understand the difference between hiding and showing columns in your grade book so that your view (and your students' view) makes sense.

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Leaving feedback for students: These screenshots show both the instructor and student views of instructor feedback when grading discussions. The key here is that students MUST click on something to see their feedback.