One of the benefits of a flexible grading tool is that you can grade almost any way that you want. One of the problems with a flexible grading tool is that it is complex and sometimes confusing. The Brightspace grade book complexity, while allowing instructors to grade in a manner that suits their needs, has created confusion. To help instructors navigate the tool and more efficiently work with the grade book this post will explore the grade book workings starting at a high level by considering the connection between activities and grade columns and category structures for activities and grades.

A major difference between the Brightspace grade book and the Blackboard grade book is that Brightspace allows grade columns and activities to be separated. So, you can create an assignment or quiz without a corresponding column in the grade book. In contrast, in Blackboard when you created an assignment or deployed a quiz, a column was created in the grade book. In fact, you could not remove a column in the grade book without deleting the corresponding assignment/quiz and the grades associated with them.

In Brightspace, if you have an assignment associated with a grade column and decide to replace that assignment with another, you can disconnect the assignment from the column, create a new one, and connect that to the original grade column. By disconnecting the assignment from the grade book column, you preserve the assignment (and any associated submissions and grades). This preservation may be important to record work in the course that you decided should not be graded but you might want to refer back to when establishing a participation grade.

In addition to being able to separate activities from grade columns, the points possible per graded item can be different in both places. So you could have an assignment with points possible of 100 but the column points set to 10 points. Brightspace can calculate the values but they could cause a calculation error if you really wanted the points to be 100. This is another setting to pay attention to and we recommend setting them to the same value.

Another point of confusion I’ve seen is the categories in the grade book and in the activities. For example, you can create categories for different assignments. When you connect these assignments to grade items, many would assume that the category that the assignment was in is transferred to the grade item. That is not the case. Blackboard did not have any categories for assignments or tests so this is a unique feature of Brightspace we need to grapple with. In Blackboard, all the categories existed in the grade book. When you added an assignment to the grade book, a column was added and the category assignment selected unless you selected a different category, in the grade center.

In Brightspace the categories in the activities and grade book serve different purposes. In the activity areas, categories serve to group similar or related activities. In the grade book, the categories are used for weighting in the grade calculation. Because the activity categories are separate from the grade book categories they do not have to match. In the example above, none of the activity categories matches the categories in the grade book exactly. You could also have two categories of activities that are counted in the same category in the grade book, for example, activities that are used to determine a participation grade might come from assignments and discussions.

So, when setting up your grade book you may want to create all the categories and grade columns in the grade book first as well as setting up the calculation, weighted or points-based, and then attach activities as you create them. Map out how the activities will connect to the grade book so you know what to connect where.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some of the weighting systems and how to set them up. And for the brave, I’ll consider formula-based grades.