Brightspace Grades Tool
Quick Start Guide
The Brightspace Grades tool offers a powerful and flexible way to manage your grade book. It simplifies the grading process, enabling you to create and customize grade items for projects, assignments, discussions, and quizzes, and to integrate these with other Brightspace tools.
The Grades tool allows you to set up a grading system that aligns with your course goals, ensuring effective communication of student progress and areas for improvement. You can customize how grades are displayed, updated, and managed, creating a seamless and efficient grading experience.
Overview of the Grades Tool
The Brightspace Grades tool offers a robust suite of features designed to create and manage grades. With its flexible and powerful capabilities, Brightspace reduces technical barriers and empowers you to teach and assess in a way that aligns with your course learning outcomes.
Steps to Setting Up Your Grade Book
- Complete the Grades Setup Wizard.
- Create grades categories to group similar assessment items.
- Create grade items.
- Create assessments and link to the grade book.
Things to consider
Before setting up your Brightspace grade book, refer to the course’s Education Council approved grade allocation. Use the grade allocation to guide your creation of grade categories.
Grading serves a dual purpose: providing feedback and evaluating student work. Through effective grading, you communicate students’ performance, highlight their progress, and identify areas needing improvement to achieve course goals. In addition to marks, plan how you will provide feedback on graded items. Consider using rubrics, comments, and other feedback tools to give constructive and meaningful feedback.
Complete the Setup Wizard
You can configure the setup of your gradebook by clicking My Tools > Grades.
The Setup Wizard is the first step in creating your gradebook. If this is your first-time accessing Grades in your sandbox or course, you will automatically be directed to the seven-step Setup Wizard. You can return to the Setup Wizard at any time through the Setup Wizard tab.
The Setup Wizard allows you to:
- Establish a grading system
- Determine your final calculation method
- Identify what to do with ungraded items
- Choose grade scheme
- Set Display settings
To customize the display of grades
Under the Setup Wizard tab, scroll down and click Start to begin setup.
Determine what kind of valuation system is applied to categories and grade items in your grade book.
- Weighted system (default): grades are calculated as a percentage of the final grade. In a Weighted gradebook system, the gradebook percentage weight must equal 100%. If it does not, the Manage Grades page will display an error to the instructor. With the weighted system, grade items can be organized into categories.
- Points system: grade items are calculated using a points system in which the points assigned to each item are totaled for the final grade. In a Points gradebook system, the total can be any number.
- Formula system: grades items are calculated using the points systems, and a can custom defined formula can be created to set conditions around how grade items contribute to the final grade.
Best practice: choose the system that best aligns with your course learning outcomes and evaluation methods.In this step, determine how the final grades will be released to students.
- Calculated Final Grade: the final grade is calculated based on the established grading formula. With this selection the final grade is automatically calculated based on what’s in the gradebook. You cannot adjust the final grade without adjusting grade item scores.
- Adjusted final grade: allows for manual changes to the final grade calculation without affecting grade item scores. An Adjusted Final Grade is a final grade that you must manually enter to override the calculated final grade.
- Automatically Released Final Grade: if checked, the system automatically marks users’ final grades as released once created. You may still alter the release status after being automatically released.
Note: We recommend Calculated Final Grade during the semester. If you need to adjust final grades at the end of the semester, you can enable Adjusted Final Grades at that point.
In this step, decide if ungraded are treated.
| Drop ungraded items | Treat graded items as 0 | |
| Description | If a score is not entered for a grade item, the item will not be calculated as part of the cumulative score. If this option is selected, the final grade will show the cumulative score for the work assessed so far. However, instructors must manually enter a score of “0” for uncompleted assignments. | If a score is not entered for a grade item, it will be calculated into the cumulative final score as if scored as 0. Select this option is you leave grade items blank when no work is submitted, and you do not want to manually enter 0’s for student who do not submit assessment items. |
| What it means | Items are not calculated into the Final Grade until a grade (including a zero) is entered. Students start with a 100% in the gradebook and work down. | Students receive zeros for all assignments until the zero is replaced with an entered grade. Students start with a 0% in the gradebook and work up. |
| Benefit | Only activities that have been turned in and assessed are calculated in the Final Grade. | You do not have to enter zeros anytime a student does not submit an item. Also, when Treat ungraded items as 0 is selected (and if you have released the Calculated Grade), students know exactly what their grade is at any point in time if they were to stop doing work. |
| Drawback | You must enter zeros anytime a student does not submit an item. Also, when Drop ungraded items is selected (and if you have released the Calculated Grade), students may see an inaccurate snapshot of their performance – especially if more heavily-weighted activities occur later in the semester. | If you release the Calculated Grade, students appear to fail the course until they have completed a significant number of activities. |
Select the Automatically keep final grade updated checkbox to keep final grades updated automatically. If you do not select this option, you must manually go to the grade book to perform final grade recalculations.
Grade schemes define how grades are organized or labeled within a course or for a specific grade item. Percentage is the default grade scheme.
Watch the following video to learn how to create a custom grade scheme.
In this step, determine how you see grade calculation data. This option does not manage how many decimal places are displayed to students (that option is part of Step 6).
In this step, control how grades appear to students. Determine whether students see their grades as straight values, percentages, or scheme levels, and whether they can see the calculation method (logic) behind their final grade.
- Points Grade: grades will be displayed to students as a point value Ex. 75/100
- Weighted Grade: grades will be displayed to students as a percentage Ex. 75%
- Grade Scheme Symbol: grades will be displayed to students as a symbol (letter grade) Ex. B+ NOTE: Only select this option if you have set up a grade scheme
- Grade Scheme Colour – If a grade scheme has been set up, the student’s grade will have a shaded background colour that corresponds to the grade scheme symbol. Ex. a green background for an A grade.
- Decimals displayed: enter the number of decimals used for student grade calculations. The default is 2. The number must be between 0-5.
- Characters Displayed: determines how many characters of a Text grade item are displayed on the user list. The default is 50 characters.
- Final Grade Calculation: select if you want students to view their final grade calculation.
Review your Grades Setup Summary.
You can change these settings by accessing the Grades tool Settings gear after you have setup your gradebook. You do not need to use the Setup Wizard again.
You have now set up your gradebook and can begin adding categories.
Grade Book Categories and Items
Under the Manage Grades tab, you can create Grade Book Categories and Items.
Using Categories in your grade book allows you to organize your items under category headings. For example, you can create category headings to organize Assignments, Quizzes, Case Studies, Participation, and Discussions.
A category can consist of one or more grade items. When graded items are grouped together in a category, you can distribute points equally across all grade items and drop the highest or lowest item in the group.
For a weighted grade book system, categories are required and used to identify weighted areas. For a points-based grade book, categories are optional.
To create grade categories:
From the Manage Grades tab,
- Click on New and select Category.
- Give your category a name and select the options that are relevant for the category.
- Click Save and Close.
Watch the following video to learn how to create grade categories.
Warning: Do not create a category to organize bonus items. Brightspace calculates subtotals for categories, in the case of a bonus item category the subtotal denominator would be 0 and division by 0 is an arbitrary math violation.
See EdTech’s Bonus Marks resource to learn how to assign bonus marks and create a bonus grade item.
To create grade items:
From the Manage Grades tab,
- Click on New and select Category.
- On the New Item page, choose a Grade Item Type from the following:
- Numeric: Grade users by assigning a value out of a specified total number of points.
- Selectbox: Grade users by selecting the grade scheme level that best matches their achievement. Selectbox type grade items cannot be created until at least one org unit grade scheme has been created.
Note: Numeric and Selectbox are the only grade items that will support associations for grading and actively contribute to grade book calculations. - Pass/Fail: Grade users using a simple pass or fail grade scheme.
- Formula: Automatically grade users using a custom formula based on their achievement for other grade items.
- Calculated: Calculate users’ cumulative achievement across multiple grade items.
- Text: Provide comments in the grade book that are not calculated in the final grade.
- In the Properties tab, enter the details for your grade item.
Note: The fields in Properties will vary based on your chosen Grade Item Type. To learn more about a particular field in Properties, click the Get help on (? icon) beside the field. - In the Restrictions tab, enter the following information:
- Hide from users: Hide restrictions from learners.
- Has Start Date: Set a Start Date for the grade category.
- Has End Date: Set an End Date for the grade category.
- Display In Calendar: Display Start and End Dates in the course Calendar.
- Release Conditions: You can Attach Existing conditions or Create and Attach conditions.
- Click Save and Close.
Associate Activities with Grade Items
The final stage in setting up your grade book and having it populate with student marks is to associate graded activities with the grade items in your grade book. The following videos shows you how its done.
Now that you’ve setup your grade book you can learn more about managing your grade book and grading assessments.
More About Grades
Visit EdTech’s Brightspace Instructor Help, to learn how to
For help setting up your Brightspace grade book or help with more advanced tasks, such as setting extra credit and bonus grade items, contact EdTech.
Contact edtech@langara.ca for more information.
