The attendance feature in Blackboard can be extremely useful. It can be a little limiting, however, because the point value is always set to 100 and students get a percentage of that based on their attendance. Not to worry! You can make this work with a little bit of calculation.

 

Create your Calculation

  1. Go to your Blackboard course.
  2. Click Gradebook.
  3. If you are in the Grades view, hover over over the area between two columns in the gradebook and click the plus sign (+).

    If you are in the Gradeable Items view, hover over over the area between two rows in the gradebook and click the plus sign (+).
  4. Click Add Calculation.
  5. Click on the name of the Calculation and type your preferred name.
  6. Choose Points from the Select a grade schema, drop-down menu.
  7. Click the following to create your calculation:
    Total
    Multiple (*)
    Value
  8. Click on the down arrow next to Total and click Attendance. (Make sure to choose the correct attendance column, from the “Coursework” list, not the category.)
  9. For the Value enter the number that you need to multiple 100 by in order to get your desired number of points for Attendance. For instance, if you wanted to have 70 attendance points you would enter .7 here. If however you wanted 130 attendance points then you would enter 1.3 in the box.
  10. Click Save.

 

Remove Original Attendance Grade from Calculations

Now you need to make sure the original attendance grade isn’t counting towards the overall grade, but your new calculation is.
  1. Click the … next to Overall Grade.
  2. Click Edit.
  3. Click the exclude button (looks like a circle with a diagonal line through it) for the Attendance grade.

    An excluded item will have a value of 0 and the exclude button will change from black to purple.
  4. Since Calculations are not figured into the Overall grade, you must also unlink the Calculation you created for Attendance to include it in the overall grade. Click the unlink button (it looks like a chainlink with a line through it) next to your new attendance calculation.

    It will now appear above the calculations section and the point value at the bottom will change to include it.
  5. Click Save.
This will create your new Attendance points and then exclude your old attendance value from grading.