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How Weighted Grades are Calculated in the Blackboard Gradebook

In Blackboard weighted percentages are calculated by summing all individual weighted grades in the gradebook.

Note if you use export gradebook to save a .csv file, the weighted percentages will not be correctly exported.

Example:

 You have four items in your gradebook and

  • item 1 is a test out of 100 points, worth 20%
  • item 2 is a quiz out of 10 points, worth 10%
  • item 3 is an assignment out of 5 points, worth 5%
  • item 4 is a text out of 100 points, worth 25%

Note that the total available points are 215
and that the percentage only adds up to 60%.

And a student has the following marks for these items:

  • item 1 - 97 points
  • item 2 - 9.1 points
  • item 3 - 0 points -- the student missed the assignment
  • item 4 - 83 points

The student has 189.1 total points.

You might calculate the student's percentage by dividing the student's total points by the total available points and get 87.9%.  Blackboard, however, calculates this differently:

Blackboard calculates a weighted value for each item and sums the total (student points for item 1/total available points for item 1 + student points for item 2/total available points for item 2, etc.) and gets the answer 49.25% (out of 60) or 82% (which is the same answer that you would get with Excel, performing the calculation in the same way.

This example would work out the same way if the values added up to 100%.

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