November 2023 Updates

Matching question updates: partial credit auto-distribution and other updates.

Partial and negative credit is turned on by default, and partial credit as a percentage across the matching pairs is auto-distributed, saving the instructor’s time. Instructors can edit the partial credit values if needed to grant some pairs more or less credit. Instructors can also award negative credit percentages to any pair. Negative credit is only assessed when applied and when a student mismatches a pair. If desired, instructors may choose to allow an overall negative score for the question.

There have been a few other improvements:

• The question construction guidance has been reworded and moved to an info bubble.
• In the past, the “reuse an answer” and “delete pair” options were behind the three-dot menu. Now, these options appear on the right side of the answer for each pair.
• Before reused answers appeared as “Reused answer from pair #” in the answer field. Now, the answer itself is displayed in the answer field. “Reused answer” appears beneath the answer for the pair.
• We renamed “Additional answers” to “Distractors.”

Tab navigation for Journals.

Instructors can now switch between the Journal and the Participation page, improving navigation. When an instructor sets up a journal for grading, the Participation is replaced by Grades & Participation. This update improves the usability of the journal. It also provides consistency of navigation with discussions and assessments.

Anonymous grading in Flexible Grading view

Anonymous grading is now available in the new Flexible Grading experience. Instructors can now complete the following tasks and actions:

• Grade test and assignment submissions by student
• Filter on grading status of choice
• Navigate between students and multiple submission attempts
• Keep track of grading progress
• View both the attempt- and the final grade for each assessment
• Provide meaningful feedback, with or without a rubric
• Grade inline using Blackboard Annotate
• Collapse side panels to view more of the student submission
• Show an originality score if SafeAssign is used

*Please note that anonymous grading for tests by questions will be released in a future update.

Grading optimization for file-based Assignment submissions in Flexible Grading

Some instructors design assignments that require students to attach one or more files. Now, when grading file-based submissions, a tabbed interface appears. The first tab displays the assessment instructions. After that, there is one tab for each submitted file. The first attached file displays by default.

This new tab-based navigation has several benefits:

• More of the student submission is visible to the grader without scrolling.
• Navigating file-based submissions is more transparent and easier by removing multiple scroll bars.
• The option to download the student-submitted file(s) is more apparent.
• The number of files the student attached to their submission is clear.
• Graders can switch between the assessment instructions and the submitted file(s).
• Graders can easily navigate across the submitted files.

Edit/Regrade in Questions view

Instructors may spot a mistake in a test question when grading a test submission.   Now, instructors can also access the Edit/Regrade workflow when grading by question (in addition to previously only being able to edit by “Student”.

Sorting controls for Student Name, Overall Grade, Assessments, and Manual Columns in grid view

Sorting options in the gradebook provide a more efficient grading experience.

Now instructors can sort the following gradebook grid view columns:

• Student Name
• Overall Grade
• Tests and Assignments
• Manual columns

Instructors can sort records in ascending or descending and remove any applied sorting. A purple highlight in the column header helps instructors identify where sorting is applied.

Gradebook grid view performance improvements

To improve user experience, several improvements were made to the gradebook grid view, addressing overall performance and reducing load time.

Performance tested scenarios:

• 25K student enrollments and 400 gradable items:
  Load time reduced from 108 s (about 2 minutes) to 14s (87% performance improvement)
• 2000 student enrollments and 400 gradable items:
  Load time reduced from 19s to 8s (57% performance improvement)
• 40 students and 400 gradable items:
  Load time reduced from 8s to 6.8s (14.75% performance improvement)