Grade Center: Two things made massively easier

Two major grade center improvements:

1) you can reorder gradebook columns simply by dragging and dropping.
2) You can change categories en masse.

Both features are available in Full Grade Center > Manage > Column Organization.

Categories

To view which category an item is assigned to, go to:

Grade Center > Manage > Categories

Although the page appears to be disorganized, it is a neat tool that lets you see which category each assignment appears under in the grade book. You can’t edit anything in this area with the exception of category names.

Forum Grade versus Discussion

Discussion grades for courses transferred from BB7 will be categorized as Forum Grades in the gradebook in BB9 like they are in BB7, however, BB9 also has Discussion as a grading category. The theory is that a new forum will that is set up as graded, will by default be put into the discussion category. If this is true, then we may need to consider cleaning up the discussion categories across all courses.

Grade Center views

In the Control Panel > Grade Center, the instructor has three views: Full Grade Center, Assignments, and Tests. How are these column types determined though? By the category applied to each column? To be checked.

Follow up: These column types are determined by categories. If you click Grade Center > Tests, you only see columns assigned to the category "Test." Unfortunately BB7 assigned the category "Exams" by default to new tests, which means we won't be migrating many courses that utilize the category "Tests." Bummer. The "Assignments" view may be more helpful.

This is a training point.

Assignments in transferred courses

Assignments in courses that are transferred over seem to transfer correctly. They are editable by the instructor. For "Number of attempts," the default value is "Once."