Once you’ve associated a rubric with an assignment, test, or a marked discussion or journal, you can use it to mark the students’ work. Please note that you can currently associate only one rubric to each item. You can’t associate a rubric to an assignment with questions at this point, so you should add/create the rubric before adding questions to the assessment.
Please see the guide on Creating Blackboard Rubrics.
- Marking with a Rubric
- Anonymous marking with a Rubric (important advice)
Marking with a Blackboard Rubric
To mark an assessment using a rubric, go to the gradebook, select the assessment you’re marking, then select a student’s name to access their submission:
On the student submission page, select the rubric icon to open the rubric in a panel next to the submission. On the rubric, you can select a performance level for each criterion. You can deselect a performance level and choose another if you change your mind while grading. The rubric score saves automatically as you make your selections:
You can give overall feedback to the student by opening the Overall Feedback panel, adding and saving your feedback, and you can provide individual criterion feedback, using the text box in each criterion. There’s no character limit on written feedback. The editor is a plain-text editor:
After the score has been calculated by the rubric, you can override the final mark:
If you associate a rubric with a marked item, you should mark using the the rubric. If you enter a mark as an override, the submission will continue to display as Needs Grading.
The rubric score and feedback save automatically as you make selections. The mark you assign with the rubric appears on the student’s submission page, their Activity Stream and the gradebook. They can also access a marked item on the Course Content page to review their submissions, the rubric, your feedback, and their marks.
For percentage-range rubrics, each performance level has a range of values. When you mark, you select the appropriate percentage level for each performance level. The system calculates the points earned by multiplying the weight, achievement percentage, and item points.
You can return to the item at any time to change the mark, even after you’ve posted it.
After you use a rubric for grading, you can’t edit it, but you can make a duplicate copy that you can edit and rename. Please see TEL guidance on Creating Blackboard Rubrics.
Anonymous marking
Be aware: If you attach a rubric to an assignment with anonymity switched on, this is used to calculate the mark for the submission and you cannot manually adjust the mark (use Override Mark) until anonymity is lifted after marks are posted.
Currently, there is not an option to use a non-marking rubric (to give only qualitative feedback). If you are using a ‘Points’ rubric and entered zeros for all criteria as a workaround to this, a mark of zero is entered for the submission and you cannot change this until the marks are posted to lift anonymity. This makes it impractical for marking.
The recommendation is only attach a rubric to an anonymous assignment if you do want it to calculate the final mark.
Guide last updated on November 4, 2024
