Date associated with Submission Comment(s) when Manual Post Policy is used

[Tasha_Biesinger]

When instructors set a Manual Post Policy students are not able to see grades or submission comments until the instructor posts grades. We recently noticed that the date/time associated with the submission comment(s) is the date/time that the submission comment was written/created vs. when the submission comment was made available/posted.

This makes sense for several reasons:

• it is just easier technically
• instructors can post then rehide grades/comments
• it helps maintain the proper order of comments

I'm convincing myself more and more that this is fine behavior as I write this, and perhaps I'm just feeling extra sensitive around which dates show to who because of the Announcements update that was showing the 'created' date vs 'posted date' to students.

I'm curious what thoughts other folks have on this topic.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tasha_Biesinger,

To me, this one seems more "okay" than the announcements issue.  Announcements were very problematic because they might be set up far in advance or even imported form a previous year's course, and I understand that students probably don't need to know when an announcement was created originally.

I think students generally understand that teachers can't grade everything at exactly the same time, and often wait until all grading is done to release results to all students.  Now perhaps there is a faculty member doing grading at 3am on a Saturday night and they don't want students to know about that, but I think transparency around the actual day/time things were graded or comments were made is a good thing overall.

Curious to hear what others think as well though!

-Chris