Docent - Teacher

How do I attach a grade item and/or rubric to a discussion topic?

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If you want to assess a discussion, you can do this based on a rubric and/or a grade item. By linking a grade item to a discussion topic, you can have Brightspace automatically include the assessment for the discussion topic in the final grade.

Read the article How do I create a grade item? if you are still unfamiliar with grade items and want to know how to create a grade item. You can find out how to assess a discussion topic in the article How do I assess a discussion topic or post (grade item, rubric)?

  1. Go to Activities in the navbar of your course.
  2. Click Discussions.
  3. Click the arrow behind the discussion topic to which you wish to link a grade item.
  4. Click Edit Topic.

Linking a grade item

  1. Grade Out Of is set to Ungraded by default. Do you want to link a score to a topic? Click Ungraded and enter the maximum amount of points that can be earned.
  2. Click the drop-down menu. Four options will appear and you can use two of these to link a grade item to your topic.
    • In Grade Book: Brightspace will automatically create a grade item with the name of your topic and the maximum amount of points you have chose.
    • Edit or Link to Existing: you can create a new grade item yourself or link the topic to an existing grade item.

If you choose Edit or Link to Existing, you will be shown a new window.

Here you can choose:

  • Link to an existing grade item to link the topic to an existing grade item and select the grade item you wish to link.
  • Create and link to a new grade item to add the grade item to a Grade Category and to choose a Grade Scheme.

If a grade item is already in use by another activity, it will no longer appear in the drop-down menu.

Confirm your choice by clicking OK. Do you also want to link a rubric? Then stay on the edit page of your topic. Are you done editing your topic? Then click Save and Close in the bottom left-hand corner.

Evaluation and feedback

On the right-hand side of the edit page of your topic, click the arrow next to Evaluation & Feedback to open that tab. Here you can link a rubric and indicate if and how you want to assess individual posts.

  1. Click Add Rubric
  2. Choose:
  3. Enable Allow evaluation of individual posts if you want to be able to assess individual posts within a discussion topic. The discussion topic is assessed based on the assessments of each individual post. If you do not enable this option, you assess the student's score based on the entire topic.
  1. Select which assessment method you wish to use in the drop-down menu.
  2. If you have enable assessment of individual posts, you can choose to also include posts that have not been assessed in the total score. Those will be worth zero points. Enable Include unevaluated posts in the topic score calculation as zero if you want this.

Click Save or Save and Close in the bottom left-hand corner to save your settings.

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