Ultra Gradebook

Use your course's Gradebook page to quickly access its coursework and enrolled students. You can customize the gradebook, search submissions, and upload or download grades.

Access the gradebook

From Courses, open a course. Then select Gradebook at the top of the page.

You can manage items and post grades from three views: Gradable Items, Grades, and Students

Gradable items view

The Gradable Items view displays all gradable items in your course. You can view due dates, grading status, and item categories. You can also post grades and adjust the overall grade calculation for the course.

• Items with missing submissions past the due date display in red.
• Use the move button to drag and drop items in a new order.
• Select an item’s name to go to its Submissions or Grades & Participation page.
• Select X to grade to go directly to the assessment’s Submissions page and start grading.

Grades view

The Grades view displays each student’s grade for a specific assignment, with one student per row and one gradable item per column. Use the arrow buttons to sort columns into ascending or descending order. 

In the grid, you can select a student’s gradable item to open a menu with these options:

• View — Go directly to the assignment submission and start grading.
• Feedback — Enter feedback for overridden test/assignment grades and automatic zeros. 
• Post — Post a grade that’s been assigned but not yet posted.
• Add or edit exceptions — If an assignment is timed or has a due date, you can add exceptions here, as well as allow multiple attempts.
• Add or edit exemptions — You can remove an assignment from being counted towards a student’s overall grade.

The student grid contains color-coded text:

• Green — Posted grades
• Red — Automatic zeros
• Purple — New submissions

When you select a gradable item at the top of the Grades view, a menu opens with options to edit or delete the item or send a reminder. Additional options including Question Analysis, Download Results, Statistics, and Download Submissions are available based on the type of gradable item and whether students have made submissions. 

For a more efficient grading experience, you can customize the Grades view:

• Use sort options on each gradable item's column to view the information ascending or descending order.
• With the Filter button, you can narrow the information displayed in the grid to exactly what you need: Students, Groups, Gradable items, Assessment type, or Categories.

Students view

 The Students view lists the names of all your students with their dates of last access and their overall grades. You can only see overall grades if you’ve set up the overall grade for the course. Students with grading accommodations have a purple flag with their name.

• You can directly message students and add accommodations from the Students view.
• Search for particular students by name, username, or student ID. If you don’t see usernames, your institution’s privacy policies are keeping usernames hidden.
• Select a student’s name to go to their student overview.

Gradebook settings

You can use gradebook settings to customize your gradebook to match your teaching style and course goals.  Select the Settings button to open the Settings panel.

Grade Schemas

Grade schemas map assessment scores to percentages, letter grades or some other notation for reporting performance.

Student Performance

You can receive alerts in your activity stream about student performance and activity. You can set an alert for the number of days a student is inactive. If you’ve set up the overall grade for your course, you can also receive an alert when a student’s overall grade percentage drops below a certain point. 

Select View Course Activity to go to the Course Activity report.

This report won't display if there's not enough data in your course to populate it. 

Automatic Zeros

You can choose to automatically assign zeros to missing work past the due date. If allowed, students and groups can still submit work after an automatic zero is assigned to improve their score. Then, you can grade as normal.

If you assign automatic zeros, your settings are applied to these gradable items:

• Assignments and group assignments
• Tests and group tests
• Gradable individual and group discussions
• Discussions
• Journals
• Scorm
• Manual grade items
• LTI items

The automatic zeros setting doesn't apply when you collect submissions offline. If you collect submissions offline, you must manually create the student attempts and submission dates and times.

Overall grade

The overall grade is a calculated item displaying a running tally of all the items you grade and post that counts toward the overall course grade.

Grade Categories

Grade categories are groups of similar coursework. You can add custom categories to the gradebook.

Course Rubrics

A rubric is a scoring tool you can use to evaluate gradable work. You can provide clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each part, at varying levels of skill. You can create a new rubric from the Gradebook Settings panel. If your institution uses the AI Design Assistant, you can also generate a new rubric by using the AI Design Assistant. 

Overall Grade Notations

You can create and manage grade notations to override a student's overall grade if their performance falls outside the defined schema. For example, if a student has to withdraw from your course in the middle of a semester, you can use a grade notation to indicate the student's circumstance or situation without assigning an actual grade.

To add a grade notation, select Add Overall Grade Notation. Enter a name and description. 

To apply a grade notation, go to the gradebook in Grades view and select the student's overall grade cell. From the menu, choose the notation. The cell will turn gray to indicate that you overrode the overall grade.

To remove the override, select the student's overall grade cell and select Undo Override. The overall grade reverts back to the overall grade calculation you defined for the course.

Accommodations

You can add accommodations for individual students, such as an exemption from assessment due dates or time limits. Use accommodations to help students progress in the course even though they may have difficulty with some requirements.

To add an accommodation, go to the Students view of the gradebook. Select the More options menu at the end of a student row, and then select Accommodations to open the Accommodations panel.
 
You can also select a student’s name to open their student overview. Then select Accommodations. 

When an accommodation is assigned to a student, a purple flag appears by their name. 

Send reminders

You can send reminders to students or groups who haven’t submitted an assignment yet. 

• From the Gradable items view, open the More options menu for the item, and then select Send Reminder. 
• From the Grades view, select a gradable item at the top of the grid to open its menu. Then select Send Reminder. 

Reminders are an option for all gradebook items, including LTI and third-party tools. You can only send reminders if you are enrolled in the course. The item must be visible to students and have no release conditions.    

• Reminders are sent to the student or group as a blind carbon copy (BCC) course message. Instructors receive a copy of the message too.
• If messages are turned off for the course, reminders are sent as email.
• For anonymous grading, students always receive reminders via email to preserve anonymity. 

Add gradable items, calculations, or attendance

You can add gradable items, calculations, or attendance directly in the gradebook.

• From the Grades view, select the plus sign between rows to access the menu.
• From the Gradable items view, select the plus sign between columns to access the menu. 

Add items

Add gradable items to record grades for any type of activity that takes place outside of Blackboard Learn, such as field trips, observed assessments, or participation grades. You can also use gradable items to transcribe grades for assignments or tests completed on paper. 

From the menu, select Add Item. The new item won’t show up on students’ Course Content pages, but they’ll see the item in their gradebook. 

Add calculations 

You can add a calculation, such as an average assignments grade. From the menu, select Add Calculation. 

Add attendance

After you enter attendance, the Add Attendance option won't appear in the menu again. To remove attendance from gradable items, use the attendance settings or gradebook grid.

Download results

If you want offline records of student answers for certain types of gradable items, you can download results as an Excel (XLS) file or a comma-separated values (CSV) file.

• In the Gradable items view, select Download Results from the More options menu.
• In the Grades view, select the gradable item at the top of the grid and then select Download Results from the menu. 

The results file contains this information for each student:

• Student name
• Question number
• Question text
• Answer text
• Possible points
• Automatic score
• Manual score
• Grading status
• Additional content
• Download submissions

Download submissions

To accelerate your grading process, you can download individual students' assessment submissions and view them offline. You can download all or only selected submissions as a single ZIP file. Unzip or expand the file to view the contents. Each submission is saved as a separate file with each student's username.

In the Grades view, select the gradable item at the top of the grid and then select Download Submissions from the menu. 

View graded item statistics

To gain insight about a student's overall performance on graded content, select a column in the gradebook to access summary statistics for any graded item. The statistics page displays key metrics such as:

• Minimum and maximum value
• Range
• Average
• Median
• Standard deviation
• Variance

Learn more

For more information about grading assignments and other gradebook features, see:  

Grading assignments

Grade assignments with Flexible grading

Grade tests with Flexible grading

Working offline with grading data

Question analysis