Introduction

The CTL Faculty Blackboard Support team has recently discovered unexpected behaviour in the Blackboard Gradebook that may affect the accuracy of Overall Grades in some courses. The issue arises when faculty attempt to apply equal weighting through category values and/or calculation rules like dropping scores. 

This issue was identified by our team and immediately presented to the vendor. Blackboard immediately began work to address this, but due to testing and quality assurance and other technical procedures, it is scheduled for release in either the May or June updates. 

❓ Who does this affect?

If all of your assessment weightings are applied directly to the assessments and you did not use category weighting, this does not affect you, but it is still advisable that you periodically check your Overall Grades to ensure it is set up correctly and accurately. Similarly, if all of your items are graded out of the same total, you also are likely unaffected.

This issue above only appears if you have assignments that have different total possible points, but have assigned an overall category weight, rather than individually allocating values to each assignment. For example, this may be an issue for your course if you have a category that contains one assignment that is marked out of 10, another out of 25, and a third out of 40. 

Fortunately, correcting this is a simple process that should only take a few minutes to complete if you follow the steps that follow.

🖥️ Video Tutorial

🗺️ Text Instructions

1. Navigate to your Overall Grade Calculations screen.
    
2. Expand one category to reveal all the items it contains. For example, open the Test category to reveal Test 1, Test 2, Test 3, Test 4, and so on. IMPORTANT: Follow steps 2 through 6 for one category at a time. Attempting to do this for multiple categories all at once will cause more work to correct.
    
3. Click the unlink icon beside each individual test. This will ‘pop’ the item out and place it above the category. You will also see a weight value box appear for that item. Once all items are unlinked, you will see that the Category now states “0 items”. 
    
4. Click the lock icon beside each of the items that you unlinked. This will allow the weighting values to be edited and will make the next step smoother for you.
    
5. Click the exclude icon by the empty category. This will grey out the category entry and redistribute the value that was assigned to that category amongst each of the items you just unlocked. This is why it is important to complete these steps for each category individually. 
    
6. Lock the now corrected items. This will keep those values from changing as you proceed with the next 
    
7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 for each category that needs to be corrected.  
    
8. Save your Overall Grade. You will need to complete this process for each course/section you feel is affected. 

For courses that use calculation rules (dropping low scores, for example), please contact Faculty Blackboard Support for individual guidance. You can reach us at FacultyBbSupport@GeorgianCollege.ca or by joining us during a drop-in session. Those are listed in your Blackboard Ultra calendar.

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