Completely Anonymous Grading, Persistently Blind Grading

[healyeb]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

We would like to have the ability to have graders use Speedgrader and the grade book without seeing who the students are. The  teacher of record would be able to see this but we would like the ability to be flexible in either allowing graders to see student names or not.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14928 .

[jolaine]

At this time, the permissions aren't granular enough to allow someone to grade, but not allow that person to view the identity of the students.

[garth]

I agree.  I meant to be suggesting that maybe Canvas could add the necessary privileges to the existing "permissions" infrastructure that they have, allowing us to create the desired role.

Since they already have the "permissions" infrastructure in place, allowing an additional permission to control visibility of user names might be the easiest solution.

Would it be difficult to inspect that new user permission when building the view, and either show or hide the user names?

• if (user.canViewStudentName)
      showName()
  else
      hideName()

Always easier said than done : )

[tbunag]

We definitely need this for our Law school!

[jenn_stevens]

We ran into a situation recently when we had an exam that all students took at the same time. The exam has to be graded anonymously because it is a comprehensive exam that will lead to a certification.

One student has a disability services exemption, and so got an extra 2 hours. She noted that in her case, there was no real anonymity since the other students all submitted at the same time, but her submission was noticeably later.

For that reason, truly anonymous grading would likely include scrubbing the submission times as well.

As viewed in Speedgrader:

[healyeb]

very valid feature!

thank you

Helen Healy, Manager of Learning Technologies

Instructional Design and eTeaching Services

The Center for Teaching Excellence

250V O'Neill.

2-1998

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 12:21 PM, jennifer_stevens <instructure@jiveon.com>

[Stef_retired]

jennifer_stevens​ and  @healyeb , without question, the time elapsed displayed subverts the student's anonymity, and as such you might be interested in following this feature idea and voting it up when it opens for voting on July 6, 2016:

[ejp10]

Anonymous grading is a feature requested by our Law School faculty. They want to grade student work without any bias of previous performance history.

[tita]

I have been encouraging people to vote for this more to bring awareness that this a widespread pain point, so much so that we've had to develop our own tool to deal with this in the meantime (which I'm presenting at Instructurecon in 2 hours). I also liked that it was less prescriptive than a similar feature idea I had entered. However, I'm realizing that even saying hide names in Gradebook (Grades) and Speedgrader doesn't take into account use cases where at least some assignments in a course or subaccount are NON-anonymous, like participation or papers (some courses at our school have that option). In addition, in our case, Instructors themselves are doing the grading, not Graders, so it needs to be anonymous to them (I note that this seems to be the case for Ellen at BC as well). 

If there were instead a way to control the flow of grades to Gradebook, perhaps an optional assignment or quiz setting, then this might work. However, that that means it's up to the instructor to remember to set this (or unset this) per assignment. That's not an issue for us, since the law registrar at our school sets up all exams, not the instructor, but I'm guessing this is not universal. All in all, this is a tricky nut to crack.

So I'm hoping that in addition to voting this up, people will share their use cases here (or let Instructure know you're willing to be contacted by leaving a comment below). For instance, our law school has some courses which final grades are solely determined by a final exam, but half of those courses let students opt into "Section 2" which can instead submit a non-anonymous paper--on closer examination, wholesale hiding names in Gradebook when Canvas Studio: Anonymous Grading feature option is on will NOT work for us (I'm curious if this feature option has been adopted at all, actually). If the issue of When Anonymous Grading is on, don't add student name to filename in bulk downloaded files is addressed,  we might instead end up setting up those final exams as anonymous "ungraded Surveys" within quizzes--this hides Speedgrader altogether but allows for bulk download of files, which is how our files are submitted. Students would still have to enter a blind grading ID in their file--Our law professors seem to prefer to grade printouts. They don't currently use Grades (Gradebook) to submit grades--they enter it directly.

So to those who voted, some things you might mention in reply--are all assignments in a course anonymous? Are they all file upload? Who administers your exams--the instructors or a third party? Who does it need to be anonymous to, just graders or also instructors themselves? Apologies in advance if I'm hijacking this thread. As mentioned, we can probably deal with our needs using a separate fix if the solution to this feature request ends up going in a direction that doesn't work for us, but it would be great if it could work for all.

[tita]

I'm going to amend/elaborate on my comment above.

For strong absolute anonymity, names would need to be hidden in Gradebook, not just Speedgrader (described in detail at " style="color: #2989c5; ). However, in addition, you would also need to build a way to allow NON-anonymous assignment grade entry, which probably means that the anonymity should be an assignment option, NOT a course level feature option that affects every assignment (though some people might like that, Instructure should check their data). Canvas would have to prevent instructors from reversing this setting if any students have started. Schools would also need to be able to generate blind grading IDs which need to be integrated into Canvas' Gradebook. There are also the soft factors; in my user research on our campus in the past, final grades are not always truly "calculated" or if they are, are done in ways the Gradebook hasn't factored in.  Other situations may differ but I think both Instructure and each campus should do a deep dive into user needs.

However, another possible solution is what I'd call an auditable solution

1) As described above, make anonymous grading an assignment setting, not a course setting

2)  keep names VISIBLE in Gradebook BUT

3) disable direct editing and upload of files into Gradebook, thus requiring that instructors use Speedgrader

4) Create a "release grades" button that only lets grades entered in Speedgrader flow to students and Gradebook when pressed (similar to a mute for both students and instructors) The student has a copy of their original grade. If changes are made to their assignment grade after instructor knows identity of student that created it, student is notified.

This might be more flexible toward whether schools had a blind grading ID (perhaps they all do) as well as how instructors calculate and enter final grade. Someone may find other issues with this solution.

As mentioned above, I don't have a horse in this race (will probably use anonymous non-graded survey in near term), but am sharing my thoughts on this in case it is helpful

[tbunag]

There's a new feature request that may help temporarily with anonymous grading:

That way, someone could be set as the grader for all the truly anonymous assignments, but never see the full gradebook.  I thought it might interest individuals in this thread.