The last two weeks of school hit differently in Brightspace. Grades are closing, students are chasing late submissions, and you're trying to wrap up a year's worth of course content cleanly. This checklist covers the tasks that matter most, so nothing slips through before summer.
Before the last day of class
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Audit every major assignment for missing submissions. Pull up each assignment and check who still hasn't submitted. This is the moment when knowing exactly who's missing what matters most. Grades are closing soon and there's still time to follow up. If you use ClassWatcher, open each watched page and the list appears automatically. If you're doing it manually, block out the time now rather than scrambling later.
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Check your quiz completion rates. Brightspace's quiz tool tracks completion separately from assignments. Go through your quizzes the same way you did assignments. The Quizzes tool has its own submission view under each quiz.
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Contact parents for any outstanding work that will affect grades. If a student is going to fail or significantly underperform because of missing work, parents deserve to know before the grade is final. A quick message now is far better than a call after report cards go home. Keep it factual: what's missing, what the deadline is, and what happens if it isn't submitted.
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Review your grade calculation settings. Double-check that weighted categories, bonus marks, and dropped scores are calculating the way you expect. This is especially important if you've added or changed assignments mid-year.
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Check for any ungraded submissions. Students may have submitted work you haven't graded yet. Filter your gradebook for blank cells that have an associated submission. These are different from cells that are blank because nothing was submitted.
If you're unsure whether a zero in the gradebook means "not submitted" or "submitted but not graded," check the assignment submission list before finalizing any grade.
Wrapping up your course
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Export your gradebook. Download a CSV of your final grades before the course closes or becomes archived. Keep it somewhere you can access it after the course end date. You may need it if there are questions or disputes later in the year.
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Export your contact history. If you've been messaging parents through ClassWatcher, export your contact log from the Export screen. This gives you a record of every message sent, by date, outside of Brightspace.
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Back up custom content you want to reuse. Brightspace content (quizzes, rubrics, assignment instructions) doesn't always copy cleanly between course shells. Anything you've built that's worth keeping should be exported or documented now, not when you're setting up in August.
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Leave yourself notes. Before you forget what this year felt like: write a quick note about what worked, what caused confusion, and what you'd change about the course structure. Your September self will find this far more useful than you'd expect.
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Set course end dates and visibility. If you don't want students accessing old material over summer, update your course dates or restrict visibility now. Brightspace doesn't do this automatically when the school year ends.
Setting yourself up for September
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Save your best course shell as a template. If this year's course is your strongest version yet, ask your admin about preserving it as a template for next year before it gets archived.
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Set up ClassWatcher before school starts. Five minutes of setup in August means you start September with a working system instead of figuring it out while managing 30 students. Import your class list, add your key assignments to a watch list, and you're ready to go on day one. Free during beta at classwatcher.com.
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Review your Brightspace URL and domain settings. If your school uses a custom Brightspace domain, make sure ClassWatcher has it registered. It takes one click in Settings and only needs to be done once.
Don't leave gradebook exports until after the course archives. Some school boards restrict access to archived courses after a set period, and getting your gradebook back out later can involve a ticket to your IT department.
The one thing most teachers forget
The missing-submissions audit. It's the highest-stakes task on this list: grades are about to close, parents haven't been notified, and there's still a window to fix things. Most teachers know they should do it, but the manual process of opening each assignment individually makes it easy to put off until it's too late.
If you're doing it the Brightspace way, block time for it now. If you're using ClassWatcher, it takes a few minutes across your whole course: open each watched page, see the list, send the message if needed.
Either way, do it before the last day of school, not after.