Setting Up the Grade Center and Planning Assessment

Overview

Instructors invest a great deal of time planning and creating lessons, matching lessons with learning objectives and then assessing whether those objectives have been met. Assessing learning objectives is done in many different ways, through exams, projects, papers, participation and more. Assigning value to those individual assessments and configuring a grading schema to display grades to students for a marking period or course is unique for every Instructor and for every course.

The Blackboard Academic Suite includes a default Grading Schema with initial installation. The System Administrator may edit this schema to reflect a general grading schema used at the institution. A copy of the Institutional grading schema is included in all Course sections of the Academic Suite. Instructors can modify the pre-defined Grading Schema and save changes within their Course sections. Instructors also have the ability to create additional Grading Schemas within their Course sections.

Individual grades, Grade Columns and Calculated Columns can always be changed within the Grade Center during an ongoing Course; though by planning out all assessments, attributing value to them, and using those values to create a Grading Schema beforehand, Instructors will spend less time editing and reconfiguring individual grades, and Students and other interested people will receive consistent grading information.

In this chapter

This chapter contains the following topics: