Faculty Grading (Rubrics and Inline Grading) Rubrics offer students a clear idea of evaluation expectations before they begin an assignment, assist in explaining an evaluation, and help to ensure consistent and impartial grading. Some Walden courses now feature an integrated Blackboard Rubric tool. Please review the below instructions to help familiarize yourself with this new tool. This document will also review an Inline Grading feature that allows instructors to grade and mark up some (but not all) assignments from within the Blackboard interface with drawings, highlights, comments and more without downloading and opening the documents separately. Jump to: Viewing Rubrics Grading Discussions using Rubrics Grading Assignments using Rubrics Using Inline Grading to Mark and Grade Papers Inline Grading Buttons and Tools Inline Grading Best Practices and Troubleshooting Viewing Rubrics To view the rubric for an assignment before a student has submitted: 1. Select the assignment link in your classroom. 2. On the assignment preview page, select View Rubric. 3. The rubric will appear in a pop-up window. You will have the option to choose between grid and list view.
Grading Discussions Using Rubrics The easiest way to begin the grading process for discussion posts is via the grade center. 1. When a student posts to the discussion forum, a Needs Grading indicator will appear in the appropriate grade center column. 2. From the menu that appears when you hover in that cell, select Grade User Activity. 3. If you would like to grade the discussion posts using the rubric, click on the title of the rubric in the grading panel to expand it.
4. If desired, Click on the grid view window to pop open the rubric in a grid form which will be easier to read: 5. Note that you can select the Show Descriptions to give all text provided in the rubric, and Show Feedback to provide a text box for each criterion feedback at the bottom. 6. When you click on the criteria, you will receive a drop-down menu that will allow you to specify the number of points in that range that you will like to grant. 7. Enter feedback if desired and then click the Save Rubric button. Once saved, the overall grade will translate directly back to Blackboard and now appear in the grading side bar. 8. There are two separate feedback fields to provide information to your students: Feedback to Students in the grading panel and a Feedback field in the Rubric area. Any information added to either of these fields will display in the My Grades area for students. It is recommended that you choose one area to provide textual feedback. Do not add feedback to both areas. If you do, the feedback in both areas will concatenate together. 9. Use the Add Notes feature to add notes to yourself for the future. Students will not see these notes. You may Cancel or Save a Draft of your notes/grading at any time. 10. Very important: When complete, click the Submit button to send the grade and feedback to the grade center. 11. You can navigate from one student s posts to the next using the left and right arrows in the grading panel.
Grading Assignments There are several grading tools available to you including rubrics, Safe Assign Originality Report (similar to TurnItIn), and Inline Grading Powered by Box. A separate document is available to you that reviews Safe Assign in detail. Grading Assignments using Rubrics 1. From the Needs Grading area of the grade center, you will see a Needs Grading indicator once a student has submitted an assignment. 2. Click on the Attempt to begin the grading process. 3. Depending on the format of the submitted assignment, the student s assignment submission should appear. 4. If you do not see the associated rubric in the grading panel, you may need to expand the rubric area by clicking on the available down arrow and then select the rubric title to expand it. Click to expand rubric section. Walden University 2018
5. Click on the new window icon to pop the rubric into a grid form which will be easier to read: 6. Use the radio buttons to select each criterion of the rubric by the student s performance. Not that you can select the Show Descriptions to give all text provided in the rubric, and Show Feedback to provide a text box for each criterion feedback at the bottom. Walden University 2018
7. When you click on the criteria, you will receive a drop-down menu that will allow you to specify the number of points in that range that you will like to grant.
8. Once the rubric is complete, the grade will translate directly back to Blackboard. You may provide additional overall feedback that will be viewable to the student in the grade center. 9. There are two separate feedback fields to provide information to your students: Feedback to Students in the grading panel and a Feedback field in the Rubric area. Any information added to either of these fields will display in the My Grades area for students. It is recommended that you choose one area to provide textual feedback. Do not add feedback to both areas. 10. Use the Add Notes feature to add notes to yourself for the future. Students will not see these notes. You may Cancel, or Save a Draft of your notes/grading at any time. 11. Very important: When complete, click the Submit button to send the grade and feedback to the grade center. 12. You can navigate from one student s posts to the next using the left and right arrows in the grading panel. Inline Grading Instructors can optionally view and mark student submitted files directly in a web browser without having to download the file. The tool allows you to comment, highlight text, strikethrough text, and more. Supported document types that are viewable in the grading screen are Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and PDF. Original formatting and embedded images are preserved. Instructors wishing to download the original document will still have the ability to do so. If a student has uploaded an unsupported file type, the inline grading tool will not be available and you will be prompted to download the students submission instead. Walden University 2018
Please note that this feature is not enabled in Blackboard Mobile Learn. Also, sessions expire after one hour. If you expect you will need longer than an hour to annotate a particular student submission, you should download the submission instead. 1. Access the Full Grade Center. 2. Hover over the needs grading indicator in the gradebook cell and click on the Attempt that needs grading. 3. If the submitted assignment is compatible with Inline Grading, the interface will appear and you will be ready to mark up the assignment. Using Inline Grading to Mark and Grade Papers 1 2 4 3 1. Inline Grading Tools - used to add comments and highlighting. Highlight the desired text or click on the document to see these options. 2. Download - to download the document. Annotations will not be available on the downloaded version. 3. This section displays the student s document. Use the tools to mark up the content here. 4. Enter the student s grade here. 5. Enter additional Feedback in the Feedback field (not shown), as desired. 6. Click Submit to save the grade, feedback and marked paper. The students will be able to view the marked document, grade, and feedback through the student s My Grades tool (not shown). Walden University 2018
Inline Grading Buttons and Tools 1. Add Comments Point to a location to add a comment. A blue comment icon will then be visible on the location that you added your comment. 2. Highlight Use this tool to shade in colored highlights to text in the student s document. 3. To Remove Comments To remove/delete annotations and markups after they are added, click on the annotation and a delete (garbage can) icon will appear. 4. To Remove Highlighting To remove/delete highlighting, select the highlighted text again and it will disappear. Inline Grading Best Practices and Troubleshooting Draft or multiple submission assignments: If an assignment requires that a student submit the same paper twice, for example a draft and then final submission, you may want to consider downloading the original submission and marking it up using the MS Word comment and markup tools instead of the inline grading interface. This will make it easier for students to apply your suggested edits and resubmit. If you do this, please be sure to inform the student that they need to download the attachment to view your comments. Feedback to Students: Please note that students may have both instructors choosing to use the inline grading tool and instructors choosing to download and then attach marked up papers to
feedback instead. You should let students know either at the beginning of the course, or in your comments, where they should look for their marked up paper. For example, if you used the inline grading tool, you might want to say, please see my comments in the inline grading tool and if you downloaded the original word doc and then attached a marked up version, you may want to say, please download my attached version to see my comments. Session Timeout: When using the inline grading tool, the session for each student submission is going to expire after one hour. If this happens, your annotations may be lost. If you expect it to take you more than an hour to grade a particular student s submission, you may want to download that submission instead. The timer restarts when you save the grade, so when you move to the next student s paper for the same assignment, you will have an hour for that one as well. Saving Feedback and Grades using Rubrics: When grading using rubrics, you will have to both save the rubric (the Save Rubric button in the rubric view), and then submit (the Submit button in the grading side bar), in order for the grade to save and students to see your feedback. Please be sure you click submit when you re finished grading a student s submission. Failure to do so will result in loss of unsaved changes. If you want to fill in some or all of the rubric, but you are not ready to save the grade to the grade center or for students to see your feedback yet click Save Rubric but then select Save Draft instead. This will save your rubric grades, feedback, and notes, but will not submit the information to the grade center or to students.