How to stop notifications showing students their grades from hidden grade items?

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We're relatively new to D2L, and I've got an issue with instructors publishing grades. Basically, I've got a professor grading his final exams, and he's got all of his grade items hidden and he even removed grades from the navbar so the students can't see the gradebook currently.

 

Then he goes into spreadsheet view and is manually typing in their final exam scores. The problem is that, once the score is typed into his gradebook, the students are getting a notification with their grade; even when the grade item is hidden for that particular course.

 

Obviously what we desperately want is a toggle switch that is something like "gradebook on/or for all students", which would be nice.

 

In the interim, I realize that we can go into the gradebook SETTINGS and change the ORG UNIT DISPLAY OPTIONS, to not display points grade/weighted grade...etc. to the students. But even after doing that, the dang notifications still spit out the game to the students, despite our best efforts to try and hide it.

 

I can't turn off the notification functionality system wide, but I'm wondering about the best way to do this "hidden gradebook while I'm doing the final" without notifications ratting us out and showing the students their grades anyway.

 

Any help here?

 

Thanks much for anything anyone can offer.