The BlueLine Gradebook

The BlueLine Gradebook,
a brief guide…

BlueLine Gradebook Terminology:

Assignments – anything in the gradebook that you will put a grade in for.
Category – a group of assignments used for weighting or organizational purposes.
All assignments must be in a category.
Points vs. Percentage Mode – this determines how the overall grade is calculated. It has NOTHING do to with how assignment grades are displayed or entered!

Points mode	Percentage mode
The overall grade is calculated simply as points earned divided by points possible.	Categories are assigned weights and the overall grade is calculated by first generating a grade for each category based on points in that category, and then calculating the overall grade based on the assigned weights of each category.

Anatomy of the Gradebook Interface

The Gradebook Management section is where your basic setup takes places. This is where you can create and edit Categories and Assignments, and establish a grading scale which is used to compute letter grades.

The Enter/Edit Grade section is where you enter or edit individual grades.

The View section simply provides a spreadsheet type view of your gradebook, which can filtered if desired with the dropdown menus, and also a Print Grades link which creates a clean PDF file of your gradebook for saving offline or printing.

The Gradebook Setup section has the following tools:

Preferences - This area is where you can:

control the default view of grades (score, percent, letter, or combinations of the three)
change between the Points and Percentage modes
specify to NOT display the overall grade if desired
access the Copy Gradebook Settings tool which lets you copy a gradebook from another course to this one (no grades or students copy)

Import Grades – A simple process to upload grades from a delimited file into your gradebook. This link is used to import grades obtained from GRADER (more info below)
Export Grades – Allows you to export the grades in your gradebook such that they can be pulled into an application such as Excel.
Import Assignments – Don’t worry about this ☺
Publish Course Grades – Don’t worry about this either for now. Eventually this will allow for you to publish your final grades to NEST.

Importing Grades scored by GRADER

Create the assignment in the gradebook if it does not already exist.
Save the scores from the zip file somewhere on your computer. The Files are emailed to you in a password protected Zip file. The scores file is the one in .txt format (different icon than the others).
In the course gradebook click the link Import Grades.
Click the Choose File button to select the saved grades file; make sure that Comma is selected. Click Next.
Set User ID to Column 0, and Column 1 to the name of the assignment from the gradebook. Change the Treat Values as section to Points and leave the Lock Import Grades box checked.
Click Finish!

The Category Editor

The screen above is what you see when Adding or Editing a category. The only required component is the Title. Calculation can be used to specify dropping x number of lowest assignments in the category. The Weight box will only be present if you have the gradebook set to Percentage mode. It is required if present and determines how much weight this category carries on the overall grade.

The Assignment Editor

When Adding or Editing gradebook assignments (not the scores), this is the screen you will see. The Title, Category, and Points are all required. Display Format controls how this Assignment will display (score, percent, letter, etc.). Leaving it on Course Default means it will display however the default has been specified under the Preferences link.
Calculation Type is only relevant to items graded in BlueLine such as Assessments, Dropboxes, and Discussion Forums. See next section for more information.

Linking Items from the Lessons tab to your Gradebook

Graded items in your course are linked to the gradebook in the Settings area of that item, on the Assignment tab. You can either select an existing gradebook assignment from the dropdown, or New Assignment to have it create a new entry in the gradebook. Selecting New Assignment gives items similar to when adding an assignment from the gradebook. Set the Category and Points Possible. The Calculation Type controls how and if the grade goes to the gradebook. Options are:

Average Score
Maximum Score
First Submission
Last Submission
Manual

Any of the first four sent over grades to the gradebook, and they only differ from each other if you allow multiple submissions. Manual however means that you will manually type the grades in the gradebook. Thus selecting Manual prevents grades from moving over automatically.