What is a Grade Journey?
Introduction
The university will be transferring provisional marks from Blackboard Gradebook to the Student Record System (SRS) for all taught modules. When you create a Turnitin Submission link, a Blackboard assignment, a Blackboard test, etc. a column is automatically created within the Gradebook to hold the provisional marks. You should also create columns in the Grade Book for offline activities like presentations, in-class tests, exams, etc.
When you enter a mark for a piece of work in Turnitin or Blackboard, that mark is then passed to that column in the Gradebook. Once the marks are agreed by the module teaching team Registry will transfer the marks from the Gradebook to SRS.
Steps when creating and marking assignments
To aid in this process, it would be most helpful if, when you set up submission links, you follow a simple set of guidelines. This consistency will help a great deal with the transfer of marks.
1. Please create all submission links in a content area in the Blackboard site called ‘Submit Coursework’ (or similar). We advise having just one folder containing all submission links for each item of coursework (as opposed to creating a content area for each item of coursework.
2. Name the submission link with the name of the assessment as shown on SRSWeb (e.g. Qualitative Study, Essay 1, Research Proposal etc). The name you give to the submission link determines the name of the column created in the Gradebook
3. Set the Point Value/ Points Possible to 100, as that is fundamental to the grade transfer
4. Please do not remove any columns from the Gradebook, marked [l1 Assignment Name], [l2 Assignment Name], etc., as this will affect the process.
More information
For a full overview of the process for the transfer of marks from Blackboard Gradebook to SRS please click on this Grade Journey for Ultra Sites video to understand the process.
5. How to hide columns and postmarks
Once you have marked the assessments, and for the Grade Journey process to work (automated transfer of Marks from Blackboard to SITS) you will need to Post the marks to allow Registry to extract grades to SITS.
It includes details of how to facilitate the Grades Exchange process in circumstances where the assignment is not managed/marked online using Turnitin.
Last updates /January 2022