Auto generated emails and notifications for "Final Calculated Grade"

Question

I used the bulk user enroll to enroll about 400 users into a course offering. Users have informed me of an email that they were sent stating that their "Final Calculated Grade" was updated with a score of 0/X. These users had not accessed the course, which I confirmed through impersonating them. I replicated this behavior with a learner test account. Does any one know why these notifications are being generated by BrightSpace?

Ashwin.R.60 · Answer

Hello @Katherine.C.491

Thankyou for reaching out to the Brightspace Community.

There are different actions that can trigger this type of notification:

Example:

-When "Automatically keep final grades updated" is enabled under grade settings in the course

-The instructor goes into Enter grades page>Final calculated grade> enter grade> Release grades

-All the users will get an email notification when the Final calculated grades are released for the first time in the course and its set to 0[starting point] even though there is no update to a specific grade item.

-Further when the instructor updates a grade item for 1 specific user,  only that specific user will get the email for the update in the final calculated grade.

We found that the following grade settings when enabled in the courses:

Automatically keep final grades updated

Automatically release final grade

Treat ungraded items as 0

This combination will cause Brightspace to calculate and release a 0% final grade immediately upon enrollment, even for learners who had not started the course as well as for the user who has just completed one module.

“Treat ungraded items as 0”-When this setting is enabled, the system appears to treat the initial zero values as updates, which triggers the notification. When I removed this setting during testing, the email was not sent.

Recommendations

Consider using Drop ungraded items instead of “Treat ungraded items as 0” for live courses.

Manually release final grades only when the course is complete.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Ashwin

Katherine.C.491 · Answer

I was wondering if there was a follow up or a solution to this. A student at our institution was also experiencing this.

andrew.g.446 · Answer

Hi Nik, thanks for the suggestion, will do. Andrew.