Truly anonymous grading?

[vkg]

I understand that the way anonymous grading currently works is that the first student in a course to submit an assignment is ID'd as "Student1," the 2nd as "Student2," etc -- and that those IDs persist throughout the course for all assignments. 

I'm wondering what folks think about this.  It seems less than ideal, since in a small class you could figure out who was the likely first submitters are, especially since the student ID persists.  Wouldn't assigning the ID # randomly be better?

[apageor2]

I would ask if Anonymous grading has a reason behind doing so? For example if this is something that is being used as to hide security education? In that sense it may be appropriate to obtain local, state, federal employment but there would also need strict requirements considered for other matters.

As to other courses or even degree level classes I honestly don't feel this would be a helpful option. That is just my opinion on this matter as I used to work for the federal government and there were strict guidelines needed.

[joel_mills]

Many UK universities have requirements for proper anonymous marking from end to end in the assessment workflow.

This is not currently possible within Canvas.

Whilst anonymous marking within the SpeedGrader environment is possible, it is too easily overridden by anyone with instructor permissions.

In addition, the lack of any real ability to anonymise the grades tool means that the anonymous marking process is broken the instant you come out of SpeedGrader and click on the grades tool. Any mark awarded is instantly linked to a student name. The switch in the grades tool that "Hides student names" has no real purpose as it does not stay hidden once you come out of the grades tool and back in again. Equally it is far to easily overridden again by any instructor.

What is needed is a far more rigorous anonymous marking process that can be turned on or off only by a dedicated role and therefore needs a separate permission flag in the Admin Settings. Any setting of the anonymity should also be logged against the individual who turned it on or off with a date & time stamp AND, in the case of turning off anonymous marking, the reason why it was turned off.

It also needs to be able to be set up so that once anonymous marking is enabled, the GradeBook is automatically anonymised and cannot be overridden by an instructor.

Anonymity must not be able to be overridden by an instructor. They should have to request access to a students identity to a higher authority in the system who would then approve it and release that student's identity.

Individual student's anonymity should be capable of being overridden by the admin.

In addition, the option to replace student names in the assessment process with student ID numbers from the SIS is needed. Student1, student2 etc is not useful when it comes to matching the marks back to the SIS.

This is a BIG problem in within the UK HE sector. The UK HE User-group is working with Canvas to fix this.

 @scottdennis ​,  @Renee_Carney ​ chrisw​  @kenny_nichols ​ Deactivated user​

Joel Mills

Acting Head of TEL

University of Hull

UK

[tita]

Hi Joel, 

I have also been trying to sort this out for over a year on behalf of our law school (and probably most law schools in the US) and I agree with nearly all of your points. 

1) Christie Wruck recently made me aware of Moderated Grading privilege which is normally given to instructors so they can moderate grading of their teaching assistants. In our case, I created an account-level role for the law school called Exam Admin and gave them that privilege, and unchecked it from the instructor role. I then checked the moderated grading checkbox when setting up the assignment. Instructor can grade it but can't see name in Speedgrader, just "Student1". The Moderator has a page that allows them to see who has been marked, then release those grades to Grades, where identity can be seen by instructor. 

In our case, it is important that the SIS ID is NOT tied to  specific assignments because students have the right to contest their grade which voids their anonymity for that assignment. If there is a second exam, they need a fresh anonymous ID specific to the assignment, thus the SIS ID, or any ID that stays with the student for the entire course, won't fit the bill. Also, in our case, the instructor has no idea who submitted first because tests are either take home or administered by an independent proctor, so Student1 is adequate.

If you need to maintain anonymity after the grade has been posted to the Gradebook (so instructor can't modify it there after they see it next to name), then maybe you can substitute name for SIS ID in courses with Anonymous Grading is turned on. As for our law school, they probably won't, because some courses need to enter a participation grade and because Anonymous Grading anonymizes all assignments in the course, Grades is the only place they could enter that next to a student's true name.

2) Although we'd love the instructors to grade online in SpeedGrader, we know most will want to download Word files and print them out. Unfortunately, when you download all submissions as a zip, "Anonymous Grading" means files aren't named after student names but still appends an ID that the instructor can tie back to the student name (I won't give it away, but there are two places this occurs). In addition, since this ID is not displayed in Speedgrader, the instructor can't grade papers offline and enter the grades into Canvas anywhere, except by visually inspecting the words or if the student were given a random, unique number to write in the header of their essay.

This is why an ID that is unique to course-student-assignment, is important to us, though it doesn't have to be based on order of submission. If we could just name the downloaded files in the zip in a way that couldn't be traced to the student identity, our law school could use Canvas Assignments.  

I'm curious about your perspective, as I'm aware multiple needs need to be met.

Keli Amann

User Experience Specialist

Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning, Stanford University

P.S. As it is, we have built our law school a very simple app that just allows students to submit a single file anonymously; without this will have to expand it to support multiple exams (new ID series each time), deliver the question online (students have to pick up question on paper), and on a timer. At that point, we'd be halfway to rebuilding Quizzes tool in Sakai, the LMS we came from, and we'd prefer not to go down that road.