I just recently became aware of a new gliche in the Grade Center related to weighting grades. If you weight grades and use the "drop lowest grade" feature of this calculated column, it may not actually be dropping the lowest grade. If you utilize this feature, you may want to use the exempt option below instead. This "drop lowest grade" feature does not appear to be reliable, so until Blackboard addresses this issue...don't use it.
The only work around at this point is to exempt individual grades for students. Please see the image to the left. If you have a grade that
you would like to exempt from a student's grade calculation, you will need to do the following. (To drop the lowest grade for every student though, you would need to follow this process for each student.)1. Go to the Grade Center within your course.
2. Go to the cell that contains the score that you would like to exempt from that student's grade.
3. Hover over the cell and then click on the double arrow button that appears.
4. Click on "Exempt Grade"from this menu.
I will let you know if hear that Blackboard has corrected this problem, but I wanted you to be aware of this possible issue.
Don't forget to clean up your grade center and check your grade center for user error issues. We all make mistakes!! : )
- Clean up categories that you are not using (some categories are in by default and can't be removed, but others should be removed). As you course copy from semester to semester, your categories will be duplicated...get rid of the duplicates. Be careful of having both "exam" and "tests" as categories...if you apply the wrong category to a column, this will cause problems if you are weighting grades by category.
----------------------------------- - Go to Manage and Organize Grade Center and check the categories and point totals applied to your assignments throughout the semester. Catch errors before they cause problems.
----------------------------------- - Enroll yourself in your course(s) as a student. Log-in as a students, go to "My Grades" on the course menu, and see what the student sees. Click here for more information on how to do this.
----------------------------------- - Get rid of calculated columns in the grade center that you are not using (Average, Total Points, Weighted Total). If it is a column that can't be removed, modify the column to not display the column in "My Grades". Just because you "hide" a column from your view in the Grade Center does not mean that students can not see it.
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