Why Use Blackboard: Online Grade Center

When students are surveyed about course management systems in general, the feature that they praise the most is the online gradebook, which Blackboard now calls the "Grade Center." Organized like a spreadsheet, the Grade Center summarizes all the assessments you create in your course. Certain assessments - for example, exams, surveys, and assignments - are automatically added to your Grade Center by Blackboard. In addition, Blackboard allows you to add new columns to the Grade Center for student work (for example, essays, attendance, participation, etc.) that you grade by hand and/or do not distribute directly through Blackboard.

Blackboard allows you to specify the maximum point total for each item in the Gradebook (to set the grading scale for each item), and it allows you to weight your grades so that students can see how they are doing in your course. As you continue to enter grades into the Grade Center (assuming you are using the "Running Weighted Total" that counts only items whose values are already entered), Blackboard calculates students' weighted grades based on the weightings you have specified.

Since Blackboard is available to your students via the Internet, students can check their grade for a particular item as soon as you enter the information into the Grade Center. (The students can see only their own grades, of course.) Blackboard thus becomes an excellent way to summarize and to communicate to your students their grades for the course which is why students like that feature, of course.

With version 8, Blackboard provides not only a full summary of the grades for all students in your course, but also a history of the grades as they were entered over time. In other words, if you change a grade, Blackboard will save the original grade, along with the new "override" grade, although the students will see only the override grade when they view their grades in Blackboard.

If you are using Blackboard to manage your course grades, we strongly encourage you to keep a backup copy as well, by downloading your Grade Center to Excel from time to time, especially once you've added a new set of grades to the Grade Center. You can export your Gradebook as a text file - either as a CSV (comma-separated values) or tab-delimeted file that you can upload into Excel, and you can also upload grades from such a file into Blackboard.

Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 13, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.