Un. Freaking. Believable.
But maybe not. Maybe I should’ve known I wasn’t gonna escape from Blackboard without one final pain in the butt.
One hundred thousand words of student writing was to cross my transom come Tuesday. A few eager beavers turned in their gigantic final papers over the weekend, so on Monday I read the early entrants in the course’s final steeplechase.
Blackboard, the bloatware that passes for the course management software favored by the local community college district, should add up each student’s points and then tell you what percentage of the semester’s total available points these figures represent. In the past, it has done so quietly and efficiently, much speeding the process of posting final grades.
So Monday I enter an A-minus (90 points) for a certain student.
Blackboard awards him a final score of 138.6 percent.
No kidding? This is a B-minus student at best. He’s racked up no extra-credit points, and he has missed 50-point assignments. How could he possibly have accumulated more than the total points available?
Whip out my calculator and discover that he in fact has captured 79 percent of the total available points.
Hm. This would explain why one of our brighter lightbulbs, one who indeed did perform a bunch of extra credit and who turned in his final paper even earlier, managed to rack up a score of 148 percent.
Manually recalculate his grade: 95 percent.
Enter a few theoretical final paper scores in other students’ rows. When we say all our children are above average, we’re not kidding!
Try to figure out what the problem is. I must have made some mistake, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. All the columns’ settings are the same, and as far as I can tell, they’re all correct.
Finally have to concede that the only way to figure their final scores without having to punch every number (that would be hundreds of numbers!) into a calculator is to build an Excel spreadsheet that works and import the data into that. Make it two spreadsheets—one for each of the composition sections.
This was not a difficult job, but it was tedious, made more so by the fact that the array of assignments differed slightly between the two sections, so I had to build two separate spreadsheets. Then I had to send out announcements and e-mails to all students in each section explaining why they couldn’t rely on their Blackboard “My Grades” function, how I would be figuring their grades, how to calculate their own grades. Of course this generated a flurry of e-mails from students in High Obsessive Gear. So I got to kill Monday evening farting around with still MORE unnecessary extra work generated by Blackboard.
This will be the last assignment I ever enter in a Blackboard spreadsheet. Starting with the summer term, my classes are moving over to sites created in WordPress.com. Communication will happen through that site and through G-mail accounts dedicated exclusively to specific courses, so that I don’t have to sift through all the junk mail that comes in from the district and two campuses to find messages from students. Grades will be kept in spreadsheets very like the ones I built Monday night. I may put them up on Google Docs, so I can access them from whatever computer I happen to be using. I’ll give students blank, formatted spreadsheets so they can enter their own grades and view their accumulating points and percentages.
Wouldn’t you know Blackboard would pull this stunt on the way out?