Tips & Tricks

Tips and Tricks on Using the Gradebook's Running Setting

You will need to read this information about the Gradebook, if the Blackboard Gradebook is your only method for determining student grades and/or is displayed within your course.

A few of the Fall 2005 & Winter 2006 courses were created with the settings of “Running Total” and “Running Weighted Total” within the Gradebook. If your Gradebook has these settings, your students may receive a better grade than you intended.
Note: Spring 2006 courses were created without the Running settings. Unless you manually change your Gradebook, this feature will not affect your course Gradebook.

The Running setting exempts items that have not been graded. This means that if you have an item, such as a midterm, that a student didn't complete, (listed in the Gradebook as a NULL [=] value), then this midterm grade of 0 will not be counted against their Running Total grade. As you can see below, the student didn't complete Midterm 2 or 3, but his final grade is an A+.

Thus, the student ends up with a better grade at the end of the quarter, due to the Running setting exempting the ungraded items.

The Running setting is working correctly to display the students’ current grade but can be deceptive to the instructor and student if you (instructor) don't replace the NULL values with a “0” and have changed the total display value to “letter” or “percent”.

Instructor Gradebook View

Student View (Running settings do not appear)

When the Running setting is turned on and the display value for Total is Score (the default setting), then the student will have to calculate their own grade.

If the Running setting was turned off, the letter or percent display for Total will display the grade based on ALL the items even if those items were not required at that point.

So as you can see, this student, who only took Midterm 1 where as Midterm 2 or 3 has not been given yet, would be currently getting an A in the class. At the end of the quarter if the student didn't fulfill these requirements, he would get a final grade of F for the course.

 

Null (Blank) Values

To alleviate any potential issues, it is best not to leave a Null Value for ANY Gradebook items.

From the Control Panel:

1. Click on the Gradebook link in the Assessment section.
2. Click on the Item link name.
3. Click on the Item Grade List link.
4. Type a zero (“0”) into the Grade box (s).
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on the Submit button.

   
   

If you would like to turn the Running setting off...

Disabling Running Total / Running Weighted Total

From the Control Panel:

1. Click on the Gradebook link in the Assessment section.
2. Click on the Running Total / Running Weighted Total link name.
3. Click on the Item Information link.
4. Click NO next to "Exempt items that have not been graded".
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on the Submit button.