Brightspace – Grades: Display Cumulative Course Grades to Students

Contents

To let students track their course grades throughout the semester, a few things must be set in place. Before anything else, the Grade Book items (columns) and categories must be accurately set up. Then follow these next steps

Your Grade Book settings must be accurately set.
The Final Calculated Grade column must be set to “release grades” to all students.

The “Final Calculated Grade” is a column that already exists in every course, and it displays the students’ cumulative scores. However, students will not see this without taking some extra steps.

Remember that you still need to enter Final Grades into Banner.

Step 0: Set up Grade Book

The steps for setting up your Grade Book are described on this page. For more details, view this video of a CTL workshop on the Grade Book.

Pertinent to displaying the final grade:

When going through the steps within the Setup Wizard, your first decision is whether to have a weighted or points grading system (or, the less common option, formula).

If you’ve chosen a points system, this simply adds up points in the Final Calculated Grade column. This means if you follow the steps on this page, students will see a very low grade in this column at the beginning of the semester.

However, by using the weighted grade method, the “final grade” reflects each student’s actual course grade throughout the semester. This method allows students to see the impact of every graded item, by weight, on their final grades. To keep the final grade accurate, you’ll need to enter zeroes for work that hasn’t been completed.

Step 1: Choose display settings

Go to Grades & Feedback
Click on Settings (gear icon) in the top right corner
Click on the tab, Calculation Options
Scroll down to the bottom and select the release option desired (in this example: Calculated Final Grade) and then check Automatically Release Final Grade
Click Save

Step 2: Release final grade to students

1. Go to Grades & Feedback > Enter Grades
2. Click the dropdown arrow at the top of the Final Calculated Grade column
3. Choose Enter Grades
4. NEW METHOD At the top of the page next to the main title, click the drop down arrow and choose “Release All.”
5. OLD METHOD To select all students, first make sure all are displayed on a single page. The default is 20 per page (see list-size indicator at the bottom of the page), so if your class is larger, select the appropriate number so that everyone appears on the page. Now, you can select all by clicking the topmost checkbox.< Once all students are selected, click the Release/Unrelease button, and note that the visibility icon in those column cells changes from hidden to visible. Save and Close.