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.
- Copy and modifiy rubrics for other assessments and courses:
- Set up your Grade Schema: It's easy to enter your own grading schema and not have to rely on Blackboard's default schema.
- Utilize the total columns correctly: Understanding the way the total columns work in Blackboard may solve many grade book issues.
- 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.
- Grade essay and short answer test questions by question:
- 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 - whichever you prefer. Then you can quickly add zeros without having to stop and skip over students who have completed the assignment.
- 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.
- 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.
