Offering a make-up exam to a student who missed the testing period? Merged two sections of a course, and now find you need to make the exam available to your Section 01 students one day and your Section 02 students the next? Merged graduate and undergraduate sections, and you now need to make some assignments available to your grad students, not your undergrads (and vice-versa)?
All these can be done through the use of the ultra-style course site's Release Conditions tool.
First, perhaps obviously, you'll need to get the assessment (usually CETL gets requests for adding tests or assignments, but this would work for any content item) into Blackboard. Then you'll use the RELEASE CONDITIONS tool to choose which students you want to make the assessment available to.
Availability
Once your exams have been added and their settings applied, you can set the release conditions. You'll find this in the spot where you choose to make the assessment visible to (or hidden from) students.
You're selecting a subset of students, so you'll want to choose SELECT MEMBERS OR GROUPS from under the Select Members heading. If you're making the item available to just a couple individuals, use the individual members pulldown list to select the students (you can pick a student from the list, then click the down-arrow and pick another, as many times as necessary).
If you're applying this visibility rule to a bunch of students, we recommend using a group. If you already have the group set up, you can select it from the "Search by group" list. Otherwise, click the "Create new group set" button.
Next, you'll click the "..." button in the box containing the name of the first student you want to apply the rule to, then choose "+Create a new group". This will create a "New Group 1" below (you can click the New Group 1 text to rename the group if you want), add the student to the group, and remove them from that "Unassigned students" list at the top.
Once that's done, CTRL+click the other names of the students who should be added. Each name box will turn black as you select it. Once you've got all (or enough) names selected, click the "..." button on one of those boxes. You'll see an indicator of how many participants you've selected. Add them to New Group 1 (or whatever you renamed it to). You can repeat this process as many times as needed to add all the students to the group.
If you need to remove someone, click the ... button in their box under the New Group 1 heading, and choose "-Unassign".
Click the SAVE button on the bottom of the group page to save your new group. Then you can select it from the SEARCH BY GROUP pulldown list. The number in a black circle left of the group name indicates how many students are in the group.
Finally, you'll want to set the availability window for this set of students.
Check the DATE/TIME box, then check the Access From and Access Until boxes and check their dates and times.
Make sure you SAVE (at the bottom).
If you need to make this assessment available to a different subset of students at a different time, click ADD NEW RULE in the upper left, and repeat the above process.
Grading
When it comes to grading, you can leave the two-person exam unscored for everyone who wasn't required to take it and vice versa. Blackboard defaults to a running total, which means unscored items aren't counted against a student's grade, so they won't be penalized for having a blank. That said, if you'd prefer, you can go through and exempt the grades if you want by clicking the cell in the GRADES view. Then you'd choose Add or Edit Exemptions. There'll be a side-panel checkbox for adding the exemption.
