The Grade Center and Traditional Courses

One key anxiety for faculty teaching traditional courses, is the integration of technology, such as Blackboard Learn, into their teaching duties.  For example, the college requires you to enter the students’ grades into the grade center. Apparently students are more successful when they have access to their grades and a full understanding of what is required from them, and using Blackboard is an excellent way of giving all the students immediate access to course materials, announcements, and the grade standing.

You have put off developing the grade center, and the end of the courses is coming. Anxiety sets in.

There is no reason to worry though.

Using the grade center is not like falling down a spiral – destination unknown.

You simply need to open your Course and select the Full grade center from the menu.
Since you have a traditional course, you probably have nothing here.   It is best practice to set this up early in the semester to allow students to become familiar with their grades and what is expected from them.

In Blackboard, every grade you wish to enter needs to have a column associated with it.  Really, it makes sense, because you will need to enter the grade somewhere. Since the assignment did not occur Blackboard, it will not have a column automatically created. On a side note: this is one more reason why using Blackboard for assignments and tests is a good idea and makes your job easier.  But you are in a panic about getting the grades entered, so let’s get back to that.

Setting up the Grade Center has three simple tasks:

• First, Create Columns for each assignment.
• Second Organize the Columns so that the Grade Center is intuitive and easy to navigate
• Third, edit a calculated column, usually the “Weighted Column”

Let’s look into these:

First, there are columns. You can create a column by selecting the button on the farthest left on the gray bar.  It is called “Create Column”.

Once you select this button, you can:

• Name the column – you will need to do this and you should choose a meaningful name for students
• Select the Primary display – usually Score (points) or percentage are the best option
• Select a Category – this will help you with grading,
• Add the amount of points.  (You should note that 100 is a good rule of thumb.  You do not want to mistake the number of points and add a percentage to a column with fewer points.  It will create havoc with the grade calculations).
• You can add “due dates” and an associated rubric, but do not have to.
• With the options section, you can also choose to reveal the column to students or make it invisible.
• When you are done, select “submit”

You will need to do this for every assignment you grade.

Second, go to the “Manage” button select “Column Organization”.   The top rows are the ones most to the left.  Organize the column order so the students can easily understand their grades. You can also ensure that the category assignments for each column is correct. Remember to hit submit to save any changes.

Third, you need to have a column that calculates a grade.  Each course has a total and a weighted total column.  These are calculated columns and chances are you will need only one – the weighted total column.

The Total merely aggregates all the columns.

Select the ‘Edit column’ after you select the weighted columns chevron.  Now you can correctly calculate the grades in accordance with your syllabus.  Using the arrows, you can either select the assignments (columns) to include or grade by category.  Be sure to make sure your grading structure is isomorphic to the one laid out by the syllabus.  Hit submit and you have built a gradebook.


You probably noticed that building a gradebook in Blackboard is no more difficult building one in with a Spreadsheet program. 

Adding grades is even easier.  Once an assignment’s column is created, you select to corresponding cell for the student, and type in the score.  It is that easy.

If you have any questions, you should check out the corresponding videos about the “Weighted Total” and “Setting a column to External”.  You should also make it a habit to check the learning resources you have access to as faculty.  They will help you make a more effective course and contribute to your student’s success.

Good luck, but you really don’t need it.

Once you start, you will realize that it is not that difficult.  Moreover, if you set up the grade center in the beginning of the course and utilize to increase communication with your students, you should notice an improvement in their performance.