I actually like the changes made between every prior version of Blackboard’s Gradebook and their (new with version 8) Grade Center. Even the bugs are exciting and new, rather than the old, familiar bugs that faculty are quickly forgetting about in the glare of learning the new interfaces and quirks. (Bear in mind that the Gradebook hadn’t changed appreciably in a decade of use.)
That being said, the bug associated with Grade Center’s handling of Extra Credit columns is terrible! In the old Gradebook, instructors added a column, worth zero points possible, and then gave students points in that column. Simple, easy, and the totaling column counted the extra credit properly.
Now with Grade Center, if an instructor does the exact same thing… the Total column does NOT add the Extra Credit, but ignores it instead. (Actually this is true of any column with zero points possible.)
There is a work-around, but… it’s incredibly frustrating to explain to an instructor that they have to do extra work just because Blackboard’s Quality Assurance guys missed such an obvious trick.
To make the Total column include the zero points possible columns, go to the Modify Column screen for the Total column. (Personally I’m enjoying the little “double chevron” buttons, although I find it hard to remember they exist sometimes.) Scroll down to section 3 of the screen, and change the radio button from “All Grade Columns” to “Selected Grade Columns, Calculated Columns and Categories”.
The screen will change, and then in the newly appearing “Columns to Select:” box you can choose each of the columns from your Grade Center and click the little “arrow in a circle” button to shift them into the “Selected Columns:” box at the right of the screen. (Please note that you can click the first column, hold the Shift key, then click the last to select all the columns in that box on the left.)
This next step is not actually included in any of the documentation I’ve seen yet on Grade Center (and so I’ll need to ensure it IS included in mine from now on): Make sure the “Calculate as running total” settings is set to “No”. If you leave running total on, you will still be ignoring the zero point columns!
Now just Submit this bad boy, and your Total column should be including the zero point columns, both manually entered grades and those from tests, assignments, and discussion boards.
Do the happy dance! (And don’t forget to feel scorn for the Bb QA guys who overlooked such a buggy subsystem.)
Just don’t get me started on how I feel about the whole “Grade Center can drop the lowest test score” debacle…
David,
Thanks for your fix. I was getting nowhere with the extra credit problem.
I tried your suggestion with four columns in the Grade Center and it worked like a charm. However, another person at the school tried it with around 50 columns and Blackboard crashed. He was using a PC and I a Mac.
Any thoughts?
Jack Holleran, Grossmont College, El Cajon, CA
Jack…
Other than my knee-jerk suspicion that the OS/browser version he was using may have been part of the problem, I can’t think of anything. (Personally, on one of my WinVista IE7 setups, any page loading that WebEQ applet makes my browser crash… which is irritating. Of course, on the same machine Firefox3 doesn’t give me scroll bars in the Grade Center!)
I have seen at least forty-odd columns totaled that way, so I doubt the sheer number is what caused the crash…
So, gut reaction: try a different browser or computer, just to check.
(Heck, knowing Bb’s quality assurance checks, maybe it was due to the exact time of submission in conjunction with the phase of the moon… stranger things have happened.)
David Gray.
David,
I just spent the last two hours learning by trial and error what you just described. Ah well, hopefully someone else will find your blog before attempting to figure this out on their own. But I think you’re mistaken on one point. You can set the “Calculate as running total” option to “Yes”, and it will still include your items that have zero possible points. I use that feature to allow my students to check their current (total running) grade at any time, including any extra credit they’ve earned.
Thank you thank you thank you!
Thank YOU!!
A note about the guy using the mac: Use firefox, not Safari (not sure why, just know that’ll fix the issue — whatever it may be).
David,
You saved me today! Thanks for the detailed instructions on forcing Bb to acknowledge extra credit columns. Now, I hope I don’t push the envelope, but how about weighted grades and extra credit columns? Any comments?
Thanks!
Vanessa
Vanessa
Vanessa…
Yeah, I’m the wrong person to tackle anything related to grade weighting. I just cannot get my head wrapped around the concept, and every attempt I’ve made to explain grade weighting ends up muddled.
I like my grade totalling to be plain Vanilla summation.
Oh, and I’m told that Bb 9 SP 1 should have this problem fixed… but I haven’t had a chance to confirm or deny that claim yet. Expect a new post one way or the other, hopefully before I go to BbWorld this year.