Associate a Brightspace activity with a grade book column

Associate a Brightspace activity with a grade book column when you want the grade on that activity to be exported to the grade book and updated automatically. Any graded activity in Brightspace can be associated with a grade item (i.e., column) in your grade book, including quizzes, assignments, and discussions. A grade item can only be associated with one activity and it must be a numeric item type.

Build your grade book first

Although you can create grade items on the fly when attaching activities to your Brightspace grade book, it's better to build your grade book first by adding all necessary grade items and ensuring that they have the right score values and/or weights. Once you have your grade book established, it's easy to attach those grade items to graded activities in your Brighspace course.

Graded activities

Several activities in Brightspace have grades associated with them automatically or allow you to enter a grade for each student as you review the student's work in that activity. These activities include:

Quizzes

Assessments created in the Brightspace Quiz Tool include quantitative questions (e.g., multiple-choice) that are graded automatically, qualitative questions (e.g., essay) that are graded manually by the instructor, or both. The result is a numeric score attached to that student's quiz attempt. This score can be exported to corresponding grade item (i.e., grade book column) by following the steps below:

1. Select Quizzes from the Assessment menu of your Brightspace course
2. Select the name of the quiz from your list of quizzes
3. Select the Assessment tab (Fig 1.1)
4. If you would like the quantitative questions on the quiz to be graded immediately after the student submits the quiz, check Automatic Grade (Fig 1.2)
5. Select the grade item in your grade book that you want to associate with the quiz (Fig 1.3).
6. Select Save and Close

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  Fig 1. Enable auto-grading and attach grade item to quiz

Assignments

Any assignment folder created using the Brightspace Assignments Tool can be configured to allow the instructor to attach a numeric score to each student's folder submission (e.g., research paper) manually. This score can be exported to corresponding grade item (i.e., grade book column) by following the steps below:

1. Select Assignments from the Assessments menu in your Brightspace course
2. Select Edit Assignment from the assignment's context menu (Fig 2)
3. Enter the maximum score for the assignment (Fig 3.1). This must match the maximum score of the corresponding grade item in your grade book.
4. Select the grade item in your grade book that you want to associate with the assignment (Fig 3.2).
5. Select 'Save and Close

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  Fig 2. Select Edit Assignment from the context menu

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  Fig 3. Add score and attach grade item to assignment folder

Discussion topics

Any discussion topic created using the Brightspace Discussions Tool can be configured to allow the instructor to attach a numeric score to each student's topic posts manually. These scores can them be transferred to a corresponding grade item in the grade book. Associate a discussion topic with a grade item using the steps below:

1. Select Discussions from the Communication menu in your Brightspace course
2. Select Edit Discussion from the topic's context menu (Fig 4)
3. Select the Assessment tab (Fig 5.1)
4. Select the grade item in your grade book that you want to associate with the assignment (Fig 5.2).
5. Enter the maximum score for the discussion (Fig 5.3). This must match the maximum score of the corresponding grade item in your grade book.
6. Select 'Save and Close

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  Fig 4. Select Edit Topic from the context menu

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  Fig 5. Attach grade item and add score to discussion topic

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