The Grade Centre
The following article explains how the Grade Centre is used in Blackboard unit learning sites to manage assessment and grade student work.
What is the Grade Center?
MySCU (Blackboard) provides an integrated system for storing and managing student assessment attempts and results, providing student feedback and calculating final grades. This tool is known as the Grade Centre and provides customised interfaces to support easy and efficient use by both teaching staff and students. The Grade Centre also integrates with the final grades process of submission and validation, which you can learn more about in the Grades process.
Getting started with the Grade Center
It is important to pre-plan your assessment strategy, before setting up assessment tasks within your Unit Learning Site and Grade Centre. Check the UCMS reports around assessment details for your unit, or ask your Course Coordinator or Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning and ensure that the total points for assessment adds up to 100.
Accessing the Grade Centre
The Grade Centre is available under the Site Management section of your Blackboard unit learning site (located by scrolling to the bottom section of the left side menu).
Understanding the Grade Centre
The following video provides an overview of the main features of the Blackboard Grade Centre.
Do not delete the FINAL GRADE and RUNNING TOTAL columns
The FINAL GRADE and RUNNING TOTAL columns are part of every unit learning site. It is important that you check the settings for these columns to ensure they are set up correctly for your unit. See Setting up your Grade Centre for more guidance.
The Grade Centre also allows you to perform the following additional tasks:
- Create Column: If you have a task that is assessed outside MySCU, you can add a column for it and manually enter marks for the task for each
- Create Calculated Column: You can create columns that calculate average, maximum, minimum, totals and weighted totals for any subset of assessment events
- Manage: You can customise the Grade Centre to optimise the information that is presented, including applying conditional colour codes, grouping assessment events into customised categories, organising rows and columns, creating Smart Views (see below)
- Reports: You can generate customised reports using Grade Centre data as well as look at the history of changes made to the discussion board
- Filter: The Grade Centre display can be customised by filtering according to category or result
- Discover Content: Reusable Grade Centre objects located in the Content Collection can be located and used
- Work Offline: You can download Grade Centre data as an Excel-compatible spreadsheet for external editing and upload changes back to the Grade Centre.
Using the Grade Centre
The following knowledge base articles provide support with the use of the Grade Centre.