Posting Grades
Grading in Blackboard Ultra is a two step process. First, grades are entered into the gradebook, either manually or automatically depending on the nature of the assessment. Second, the grade must be posted to make it visible to students. This allows instructors to control when grade information is released to the whole class, independent of when an individual submission grade is entered.Grading and Posting Step-by-Step
The process of assessment and grading in Blackboard Ultra follows these steps:
A student makes a submission by clicking the “Submit” button after completing an assignment or test. You may see the terms “attempt” or “submission” used in different parts of the gradebook interface - both refer to the same thing. If necessary, an instructor can create an attempt/submission on behalf of a student (for an offline assignment or in cases where the student submits their assignment by email, OneDrive, etc).
The attempt is graded, either automatically (for tests) or manually (for most other assessment types). At this point, the grade is not yet posted. The instructor(s) can see the unposted score/grade for the attempt in the gradebook, and see it reflected into any relevant gradebook calculations, but the student cannot. From the student perspective, the attempt will still appear as “ungraded” status, and any dependent calculations (like the overall grade, quiz average, etc) will not change.
For any unposted grade, the instructor will see a “Post Grade” button next to the attempt in the gradebook. Clicking on it, or on the “Post All Grades” button in the gradebook overview, will release the grade to the student(s), allowing them to view the attempt grade and feedback, and updating any dependent calculations like the overall class grade to reflect the new information.
There are settings in the gradebook or at the level of individual assessments that can be used to automate or adjust some of these steps, as discussed below. However, it is important to understand that these steps will always occur in the sequence described above for every submission/attempt, even if they are not immediately apparent in some cases.
Automatic Grade Posting
If you do not need or want to control the release of grade information on the student side as a separate step from entering grades on the instructor side, you can enable automatic posting for any graded assessment.
To turn on automatic posting for an assessment, open the assessment editor and click the gear icon in the upper right to access the full settings menu. Under the Grading & Submissions section, there is a checkbox labeled “Post assessment grades automatically.” Checking the box to turn on this setting means that grades will be posted automatically and visible to students as soon as they are entered in the gradebook. This setting can be enabled for both auto-graded assessments like a multiple-choice quiz or manually graded assessments like a Blackboard discussion.
Automatic grade posting must be enabled for each assessment individually. At this time, there is no feature to turn on automatic grade posting for all assessments at the gradebook or category level. Automatic grade posting is available for any Blackboard-based graded assessment, but is not compatible with most external content market integrations. Instructors using Turnitin, PlayPosit, third-party e-textbooks, etc. should remember to post grades in Blackboard as part of the grade sync/import process.
“Unposting” Grades
Once posted, a grade cannot be “unposted” or hidden from the student view short of deleting and then re-entering the grade, or posting a new grade (either as an override or for a second attempt on the same assessment, for example).
One common case where this applies is with the automatic zeroes gradebook setting. Because automatic zeroes are designed to notify students of a missed due date, they are posted automatically as well. This can mean that, on an assessment where grades are not posted right away, students who submitted on time will see their attempt(s) as “ungraded” with a blank value in the gradebook and no impact on their overall grade, while students who submitted late will see their attempt grade as a zero and their overall grade lowered as a result. The zero will be overridden once the late attempt is graded and posted, but instructors with automated zeroes enabled in their gradebook may wish to delete those zeroes as soon as the late submission has been made, to keep all students on an equal footing and avoid giving misleading information in the gradebook.
Hiding/Showing Gradebook Columns
In the original Blackboard course view, grade information was automatically shared with students as soon as it was entered. If an instructor wished to temporarily withhold grade information (such as waiting until after all midterm exams for the class were submitted and graded), the solution was to hide the grade column in the gradebook until the assessment was over and grading completed, then make it visible again to publish the grades for students. This is no longer necessary or recommended in Ultra. Using the Post grades feature is the intended workflow of the new Ultra gradebook design. Hiding a gradebook column entirely from students has a number of negative side effects:
Incomplete Course Content: hiding a gradebook column also hides the assessment itself in other areas of Blackboard. Students will be unable to see the assignment in the course content area, the course calendar, or anywhere else, and will have no way within the course interface to access their submission receipt and confirm they completed the assignment. Students who are relying on these tools to track their coursework will be negatively impacted by incomplete information.
Inaccurate Gradebook Calculations: hiding a gradebook column also impacts calculations like the overall grade from the student perspective. While an assessment column is hidden, students will see calculation totals that are based on the remaining visible assessments. Depending on the course grading schema, this can lead students to see artificially higher or lower grades in the calculated column, which will then change abruptly when the assignment column is un-hidden again. This issue is not present for unposted grades - they will simply appear as “ungraded” and will not affect calculated columns until they are posted.
Degraded Instructor Analytics: the analytics and gradebook tools in Ultra allow instructors to track course interactions by individual students in a number of ways. For just one example, when you click on a student’s name in the gradebook to view their individual grade history, you can see their course grades from their perspective (i.e. excluding any unposted grades; such grades will be listed as “ungraded” from this perspective, if a score has been entered but not posted). These features do not work properly when content in hidden from students, as the system treats such items as unavailable and therefore not part of the course content.
For all of these reasons, hiding gradebook columns while they are being graded is not recommended in Ultra. You can use https://su-jsm.atlassian.net/wiki/x/2cAzCQ tools to manage student access to assessments before/after a due date without impacting the visibility of the associated gradebook column. You can also set rules in the Assignments or https://su-jsm.atlassian.net/wiki/x/27kzCQ settings to prevent new assignment submissions/test attempts after the due date, and/or prevent students from reviewing test questions or answers after they complete their attempt. Hiding a column in the gradebook adds nothing in terms of additional security over these other settings options, and creates a number of potential problems stemming from incomplete/inaccurate information elsewhere in your course.