The Gradebook in your course Control Panel allows you to upload an Excel spreadsheet of students' grades. This tutorial will show you how to post results from an exam taken outside of the Blackboard environment - specifically, Scantron exam results outputted as spreadsheets, so grade percentages are easy to paste into an existing gradebook.

NOTE: This feature is primarily for students to view their grades, and does not officially represent their course grades as acknowledged by UMBC.

This is necessary to match each student with the correct grade. As students drop/add your course, the "official" roster will change, however, if a student drops a course, you must remove students in your Blackboard course by unenrolling them from your Blackboard course. You cannot have any discrepancies between the two rosters.

By downloading your current grade spreadsheet to obtain the Blackboard student roster and checking an up-to-date roster from the Registrar, you can verify and correct differences between both lists.

 

Before adding any information to the grades you plan to upload to Blackboard, you must add an item. The item corresponds to a column in the spreadsheet, as cells are now created for grades.

-Click Add Item

-Enter an Item name

-Choose a category

-Enter maximum Points Possible

-Choose how you would prefer grades are displayed (ex. Percentage)

-Select Yes to make the item visible to students and to be included in grade calculations

After adding your item, download the grade spreadsheet. Assuming that your Official and Blackboard rosters match, you can now copy and paste test results into the Blackboard spreadsheet.

Open the file generated by a separate grading application. Ex. A program produced by Scantron to output results to a spreadsheet.

This example displays grade by percentage, and each name and the order of names matches the gradebook spreadsheet downloaded from Blackboard.

Double-click the Excel icon to open another instance of Excel in a new window. In this window, open the Blackboard file (your course .csv file). From the "Scantron" spreadsheet (above), select, then copy the grades in the column, then paste them directly to the corresponding exam column in the Blackboard spreadsheet. Verify that the grades match to the correct student.

When you save the updated Blackboard gradebook, click Yes to preserve the .CSV file format.

Return to the Gradebook page from the course Control Panel.

Click Upload Grades.

Click Browse, then choose the updated .CSV file you have just modified.

The grades for the added assignment/quiz are now available for students to view in the Blackboard course gradebook.

After you have selected the file, the last step is to choose a column (assignment/quiz) and its corresponding Blackboard destination column.

If you import a recently added assignment, be sure to choose the corresponding destination column in Blackboard. Choosing the wrong destination column will overwrite existing grades for an assignment.

NOTE: It is possible to add an item without "adding" it first in Blackboard (see Step 2). This can be accomplished by:
1) downloading the Blackboard .csv file;
2) in Excel, add a column and label the first cell as the title of the assignment/quiz;
3) upload the updated file to Blackboard;
4) during the last step ("Choose Imported Item"), select the column you created in Excel, then Create New Gradebook Item. This will take you through the same process you would have completed in Step 2.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Bob Armstrong at 410.455.3885 or rarmstro@umbc.edu or blackboard@umbc.edu.