Blackboard Assignments with Delegated Marking – error when submitting mark

14 June 2022

Occurrence: Error when entering marks in Blackboard Assignment using Delegated Marking (“Failed to parse multipart servlet request; nested exception is…”)

Reason: The previous marker has added a very large amount of text. This is generally due to cutting and pasting from Word, which results in large amounts of formatting markup to be pasted with the text.

Workaround:

Generally, if using Word, markers should paste Word text into Notepad and then cut and paste into Blackboard. This ‘sanitises’ the text, removing the Word formatting markup.

If a marker experiences this error, then they should report it to eLearning, who can walk through the fix with the previous marker and check that resolves the issue for the subsequent marker.

Fix timescale: We have asked about a permanent fix for this problem.  However, given that it is largely a rare issue amongst all Blackboard users, it’s unlikely to be a priority for Blackboard.  For now, the advice is to avoid pasting text from Word into the Blackboard editor and rubrics.