Decimal Handling for Grades
Note
This information applies only to the Ultra Course View. For information about the Original Course View, visit Decimal Handling for Grades - Original Course View.
Institutions have specific and intentional policies around handling, calculating, and reporting grades to official transcripts and other systems of record. Instructors use Blackboard to mark, score, and calculate grades for everyday assessment activities for the purposes of applying grading scales and reporting final grades. Grade reporting policies vary widely, particularly regarding rules about rounding, applying scales, and what happens at scale break-points.
It’s important for administrators and faculty to understand what’s happening in the gradebook when various rules and calculations are applied so that one can adhere to institutional policies. For students, it’s important to have clarity around scores, scales, and grades.
For these reasons, a consistent practice of number handling has been applied throughout Blackboard to address these varied policies and practices while giving users greater transparency into calculations.
Example use cases
Some institutions have a no-rounding policy, particularly at the beginning and end points of applied scales.
Example: if a “B+” starts at 87.125%, then students are required to have 87.1250% and not 87.1249% in order to achieve a “B+”.
If the scale of “A” starts at 90%, this must be 90.00 and not 89.99 according to many institutions’ policies. When a faculty member views grades as whole numbers, it’s vital for them to understand that the requirement was met and not affected by the rounding behavior of the gradebook software.
Blackboard uses a consistent software library to perform all gradebook calculations to 15 decimal places. To ensure final calculations appear as close to what might be manually re-calculated using the displayed values in the gradebook, a higher level of precision is needed without displaying so much information that it hampers the user experience.
Blackboard grade pills
Numbers in grade pills can be displayed with zero, one, or two decimal places. Institutions can choose whether the numbers displayed are truncated or rounded to the nearest decimal. To find these settings:
Select Admin.
Select Course Settings.
Select Grade Pill Settings.
For more information, refer to Default Settings for Courses.
Download grades from the Gradebook
Grades downloaded from the Gradebook are truncated after the fifth decimal place.
Examples of truncation:
83.333333333333333…% will download as 83.33333%
75.13792864928…% will download as 75. 13792%