Blackboard Gradebook Tips and Tricks

1. Reduce the time to wait for the Gradebook to re-load everytime you enter a grade by right-clicking on the student grade and opening in a new window. This will avoid the need to go back to the gradebook to enter the next grade.

2. Use Gradeook Views, if you need to enter the grades for a particular Gradeook item or multiple grades for a particular student. Go to Control Panel > Gradebook Items, and then you can view grades by Item or by User.

3. You can easily exclude gradebook items that have not been graded by using the Running Total instead of Total. To do this, go to the course Gradebook, click on the column called "Total", click "Item Information" and select "Yes" for "Exempt items that have not been graded".

4. Download the Gradebook as an excel spreadsheet by clicking on "Download Grades" from the course Gradebook. You can then enter grades or use the tools available in Microsoft Excel to do advanced calculations if needed to calculate the Final Grade. You can easily import the changes into the course Gradebook by using Upload Grades in the Gradebook, select the excel file and click Submit. You will then be prompted to select the column that you want to import from the excel file and also to which item in the Gradebook you want to import the new grades into. As a last step, you will prompted to verify if the new grades are correct and then click Submit to import all the grades for the selected Gradebook item.

5. Configure letter grades for Gradebook Items. The default values for letter grades can be modified by going to "Gradebook Settings" from the course Gradebook, then click on "Manage Display Options" and click on "Modify" next to the display option "Letter".