Comments on: Why Post Grades on Blackboard?

By: Will Millhiser

Will Millhiser — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:10:42 +0000

And one more follow up: in today’s WSJ is an article about a related, though broader issue, “Data-Driven Schools See Rising Test Scores”, 12-June-09, p. A1. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124475338699707579.html) It seems that posting grades on BB pales in comparison to some of the ambitious use of technology at certain high schools. Not endorsing; just sharing.

By: Will Millhiser

Will Millhiser — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:10:15 +0000

A follow up: Having used BB 8.0 for a semester, it’s my opinion the new “Grade Center” is better in some ways, worse in others. One improvement is the ability to email individual students directly from the Grade Center. For example, suppose you want to email everyone who received less than 70% on an assignment. In the previous BB, this was a two-step process: find the names in the grade book, remember those names, and then go to the “Send Email to Select Users” module. Now, you simply sort the grade book by any column and click a check box next to the appropriate names.

The biggest Grade Center setback in BB 8.0? The upload grades feature. To upload grades from a spreadsheet, BB now requires a 20-digit number to identify each student. However, MS-Excel’s 16-digit precision wipes out 4 of these 20 digits if you are not careful. (Kevin Wolff in BCTC can explain how you download into Excel as text so that this does not happen.) I know CUNY seems large, but do we really need to uniquely identify 10^20 = 100 quintillion students? C’mon folks at Blackboard, this is poor design.

By: susan chambre

susan chambre — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:28:12 +0000

I think that Will’s comments are very helpful.

They stimulated one idea: to give midsemester in-class performance assessments so students can get a sense of how they are doing.

By: Tomasello

Tomasello — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:25:29 +0000

With Bb 6.3, during the semester I would sort the grades from low to high, move the list of names out of the frame, then project the grades on the screen for all the class to see. The students who had few total points could see that someone else in the class was running a perfect or above-perfect score (with extra credits) and that even with a curve, they were doomed if they didn’t make up the points but fast. Bb 8.0 is a bit difficult to manipulate this way.

But with my Bb 6.3 show, there were never any grading complaints.

By: Veena Oldenburg

Veena Oldenburg — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:25:59 +0000

I get a lot of requests to ‘curve’ the grade, and frankly I have never done it because I have no idea what a curve means in this sense. I am told that a lot of professors do this–and I am not impressed. I do post grades on Blackboard and I give them a chance by dropping one quiz–their worst mark–from their total. (I usually let the total run to 120 points and then drop one quiz worth 20 points to get back to a hundred. This has minimized disputes. I also give 3 points of extra credit for a book review. This is a pure headache for me to check that the review is indeed their own–i set the review as a question, rather than a general review, and that salvages a few bruised egoes at the end of the term.