Originally if a student withdraws from a class, the Blackboard system removes their records/hides them, without notice to the faculty. Faculty are entitled to retain/have access to the records of ALL students in their classes via the course sites, and in fact are required to retain these records per the Records Retention Policy, regardless of if the student withdrew or not. Faculty are also required to report last date of attendance/participation for students who withdraw, and need access to all the course site information in their Bb course sites.
Many faculty would like the option of grade averages to represent all the students who took a test including those who withdrew.
On behalf of the faculty, and with full endorsement from the Director and Associate Director of Financial Aid and Scholarships the changes have been made to the Blackboard data protocols so that:
- those records of students who withdraw are preserved and remain accessible to the faculty teaching their courses;
- the students no longer have access to the site once they have withdrawn as occurs now;
- the faculty members should be able to see which students have withdrawn in certain areas of the course.
Under the new changes, when a student withdraws from a course instead of being removed from the course as before, they are instead marked as being “Unavailable” in the course.
They will still be seen in the course roster that the instructor can view in “Users and Groups”->”Users” where they will be list under the “Available” column as “No”.
In addition as users are marked as being “Unavailable” they will be marked to not show in the grade center.
If an instructor needs to view information for a withdrawn student in the Grade Center, they can unhide them by going to the Grade Center, then “Manage”->”Row Visibility”, check the box by the student that they want to view again and then click on “Show Rows”.
If they want to make all withdrawn students visible they can click on the box by “Last Name” to select all of the rows and then click on “Show Rows” to make all students visible in the Grade Center. The rows for withdrawn students will be automatically hidden again when Blackboard is updated from Banner twice a day. If there is a preference for the hidden students selected by faculty to be visible in the Grade Center, please let us know.