Introduction
This guide introduces the Overall Grade in the Blackboard Ultra Gradebook to create weighted totals. By default, the Overall Grade is not set up. If/when you set up the Overall Grade, Blackboard Ultra will create a Gradebook column for the overall grade of each student. Please note that by default, once you start the process, the Overall Grade is visible to students. However. you can decide to not make it visible. Assuming you leave it visible (or make it visible at a later date), it will appear on the students global Marks page and inside the module on their Gradebook page.
Set Up
Go into the appropriate module and access the Gradebook from the top menu.
The following video takes you through the basics of creating an Overall Grade once you are in the Gradebook:
If you haven’t set up an overall mark previously, the option to set it up will appear at the bottom of the page (as illustrated below). If you have previously set this up, you can either edit or delete it (to start again). Clicking the Set it up button will launch the Overall Mark window.
You will be presented with three options to start the process of setting up the Overall Mark. We’ll explore the most common “Weighted” option. Once you select “Weighted”, a new screen appears giving information on weighted grades. This is broken down into various sections, as explained below.
On the top left of the page, you can see the selected option to calculate the Overall Mark, but because we selected Weighted, this is the option that is highlighted. Below is a screenshot illustrating this, as well as some useful help information to identify the various icons being used, such as the Exclude icon.
On the top right of the page, you will see the Overall Mark Settings panel, illustrated below, with the default options selected.
Calculate marks based on points earned out of total marked points – if selected, this will calculate the Overall grade using only assessed elements that have been graded. If unselected, any ungraded item will be calculated as zero.
Select how the overall mark is displayed by default is set to Letter (which is the Gradebook standard schema, mapping grades to A, B, C and so on). You can change this to Points, Percentage or any schema you may have created.
Show to Students – this is checked by default. It is suggested you uncheck this until you are comfortable with the score to be displayed.
The main part of the screen will show the various Marking Categories in the module. Illustrated below is a typical outline of what you might see. Please note that Turnitin assessments are, by default, not allocated a category. You can edit a Turnitin assignment to allocate it a category (such as Assignment). Otherwise, Turnitin assignments will be listed at the bottom of the list in the “No Category” section and are not included in the default calculation.
At the top of the panel, you can see Proportionally is currently selected. “Proportionally” uses the values of each graded item, whereas “Equally” assigns an equal weighting, regardless of the value.
In your module, you have an assignment graded out of 100 points and a test graded out of 50 points.
Proportionally will allocate the assignment to be worth twice as much as the test (as 100 is twice as much as 50). Equally will assign equal weighting to the test and assignment
The percentage listed with each entry shows how much it contributes to your overall grade calculation. By default, this is spread evenly across all Blackboard assessable items.
From the above illustration, we can see that all categories (other than No Category) are added to the Overall Grade (as indicated by both the percentage value and the “exclude” icon is not highlighted). Under each Category we can see how many items there are. Each category can be expanded to reveal the individual items.
If we were to leave the above example untouched, it would generate an overall grade that is equally distributed over all assessed elements in the module. Depending on your requirements, you can exclude entire categories by clicking the Exclude Icon (to the immediate right of each weighted percentage), and you can exclude individual items by expanding the appropriate category and excluding those elements you don’t wish to use in the calculation.
Once you have determined which categories and/or items to include, you can then decide on the appropriate weighting. By default, the weightings will be equally distributed. To allocate a different weighing, use the “Unlink” icon for that item, as outlined below.
In most cases, we use the Overall Grade to calculate a weighted total of two or more assignments. For example, the ICA is worth 30% and the ECA is worth 70%. So, we will exclude ALL categories other than Assignments by clicking the “exclude” icon. When this is clicked, that category is removed from the calculation – it will be greyed out, the percentage will drop to 0, and the exclude icon will become purple.
The screen shot below illustrates all categories apart from Assignment and Test have been excluded:
It is decided to not include the test in the Overall Grade, as this is only for formative purposes, so we also exclude the test. This will then allocate 100%, spread evenly over the Assignments. By clicking the arrow to the far right of the Assignments, we can expand the space:
We can see Test has been excluded (it’s now greyed out and the Exclude icon is purple. The Assignment category has been expanded, and we can see ECA One and ICA One listed, both valued at 50%. Now, we need to change the weighting, so the ECA is worth 70% and the ICA is worth 30%. To do this, we need to click the “Unlink” icon. This will then allow us to allocate the appropriate weighting:
This will now generate an Overall Grade based on the ECA being worth 70% and the ICA being worth 30%.
Once configured, select Save. The Overall Grade column will now appear in the Gradebook.
For more information on navigating grading in Blackboard Ultra click here.