Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Forms can be used to gather information from students using several types of questions including multiple choice and Likert (opinion) scale. Forms are ungraded by default, and questions added to a form have no defined right answer. 

Forms are designed primarily for creating ungraded surveys or other feedback activities in Blackboard. Optionally, forms can be manually graded and used as an alternative to automatically-graded tests or quizzes in circumstances were student grades depend more on participation and/or instructor evaluation than on correct/incorrect answers. 

 Forms share many features with assignments/tests in Blackboard.

As with assignments/tests, form submissions should generally be considered confidential between the student and the instructor(s)/TA(s) of the course; however, at this time there is no option to make student submissions fully anonymous using forms (or assignments/tests) in Blackboard. 

Instructors who want to create fully anonymous surveys in which responses are entirely disconnected from participants' names/NetIDs/other identifying information should consider using another ITS-supported tool such as Google Forms or /wiki/spaces/blackboard01/pages/154391143. Please contact help@syr.edu for a consultation on picking the best survey tool for your purposes. 


Creating a Form 

To create a new form, open the course content area where you want to place the form, click the plus icon (plus)  and select 'Create'

The Create Item menu will pop out on the right side of the content area. Select 'Form' under the Assessment section. 

Create Item menu - Assessment Section

Enter a title for the new form in the upper left. 

Click the plus icon (plus) in the center of the screen to add content to the form. 

You can add text, attach files, and including the following types of questions:

  • Essay/Written Response
  • Likert (opinion) Scale
  • Multiple Choice
  • True/False


You can also add page breaks to control the presentation of the form, as shown in the next section. 

'Add Content' menu from the form builder

Form Settings and Options

Key form settings such as due date and grading status are displayed to the right of the form editor. Click on a setting to edit it, or click the gear iconsettings gear iconin the upper right to open the full settings menu. Form settings include the following options: 

  • Due date and submission rules including number of attempts allowed and options to allow/prevent late submissions after the due date, if applicable. 
  • Presentation settings including options to present the whole form all at once, one page at a time using page breaks, or one question at a time. 
  • Grading and grade category settings. Even though they are ungraded by default, forms will still appear in the gradebook as ungraded items with a submitted/not submitted status (see next section for details). If a form is going to be graded, you must specify the number of points and grading schema that it will use. 

  • This option will create a form where one member of each group submits the form on behalf of their entire group. This is not recommended for most cases. To create a form where every student in each assigned group submits an individual response, use the release conditions feature instead. 


Key form settings and full settings (gear) icon

Form Results and Grading


Forms will appear in the Ultra gradebook just like other Blackboard content items like assignments, tests, discussions, or journals. There is no way to remove a form from the gradebook apart from deleting it, although forms can be filtered or hidden from the gradebook view like any other item. 

Ungraded forms are labeled "Non-gradable item" under the column header icon in grid view. Student attempt status is automatically displayed as either "Submitted" or "Not Submitted" for ungraded forms. 

 



Students will see ungraded forms in their gradebook view with either a green check mark icon for "Submitted" or a gray circle icon for "Not Submitted."