"Undo" Anonymous Peer Reviews

[rushx135]

Hello!

I have assigned anonymous peer reviews to an assignment, but for grading purposes need to access and use the annotation tools in SpeedGrader. I discovered here in the Q&A forum, that when anonymous peer reviews are assigned, the annotation tools are disabled. This is INCREDIBLY frustrating as the SpeedGrader's annotation functions are essential to the grading of this assignment. 

So my question is this: if I "uncheck" that the peer reviews are to be anonymous, will this then "un-anonymize" the existing peer reviews? Can I recheck the anonymous function after I have finished grading and the reviews will revert to anonymous? It is as far as I can tell impossible to check this with the test student function. 

Any help is appreciated as this is taking away precious grading time. 

Thank you,

Nahrissa

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @rushx135  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  I agree that it's a shame that the SpeedGrader annotations are disabled for anonymous peer reviews.  If you haven't seen it already, I first of all encourage you to vote up and comment upon this Feature Idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12487-anonymous-peer-reviews-should-be-able-to-use-markup-bar 

Unfortunately, I would advise you to not take time doing annotated comments in DocViewer within SpeedGrader. The reason is that while you could indeed do your annotations during the time you unchecked the anonymity option for the peer review assignment, once you re-enable it, your comments will completely disappear for students, since re-enabling takes away that toolbar again and--with it--your comments.  (I tested this in a test course that I used for this purpose.)  I suppose one option would be to comment on the document and then immediately download the annotated PDF version of your comments--which you can do, as outlined here: How do I download submission comments as a PDF in SpeedGrader?  You could then send that PDF to the students as a file upload.

What about the students?  Do they see the student names if they happened to go into the assignment during the period you unchecked the anonymity option?  My testing reveals that sometimes they do, and other times they don't.  It would be safest to "mute"/enable a grade posting policy of manual while doing this, but I got some inconsistent results, and this was an extremely small sample of two test students while I tested this, so I cannot say with certainty if students will see the reviewers names, but it will be safe to say that they would be able to.

And you are right, the Student View does not help with peer reviews at all. (I happen to be a Canvas administrator, and I tried out a few scenarios while trying to learn about them myself!)

I hope this helps a bit, Nahrissa.