Compile all essay responses to a quiz question on one screen for grading

(24)
I would love to see and grade all written responses (essays) to a quiz question at one time, on one screen.  If I need to grade #12 manually, for example, I would like all the #12 responses grouped together with a way to input grades for each one.  The "grade by question" feature as it is now still makes you go through each student's quiz separately and does not save any time at all...it basically just gives bookmarks to each question.  I am still doing a whole lot of scrolling to the bottom of the page to update scores or past a bunch of questions that have already been graded automatically.
Comments from Instructure

We have several related ideas we're tracking around this request:

Compile all essay responses to a quiz question on ... (this one)

Add Grade by Question Feature in New Quizzes

Improve Grade One Question at a time

New Quizzes: Grade by Question on one page

 

🔎 This idea has been archived. While this idea isn't open for comments, it is an important part of Instructure’s idea conversations and development process. Contributions like this are valuable as Instructure prioritizes work on new or existing features.

55 Comments
Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

This idea was moved from Under Consideration stage (no longer in use) to the Product Radar stage.  

This change was made as part of a feature idea process evolution.  Find more information, and contribute insights, by joining Focus Group: DRAFT Feature Idea Space

mastersj
Community Novice

Please make this change. Grading essay-style questions is incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming. The incredible increase in time required to grade these makes me want to switch to using multiple-choice questions instead of using essay questions, which are a much less effective form of assessment. I teach computer science and I need to see students' code to assess them! I need them to write code and I need to be able to grade it quickly. There is no method to do this in Canvas. Please address this critical change.

tiffany_maglasa
Community Novice

Agreed, please make this change ASAP. From the quiz statistics page, it lists who responded to the open-answer questions and how many scored in the top 27%, middle xx%, etc. It should also just list what their exact responses were. 

This will also help with impartiality during grading. As a work-around, I tried using the "grade by question (beta) function" feature and "hide student's name" in the speed grader, but it is not the same; it is still very cumbersome and inefficient. Because speedgrader can't handle that the questions are shuffled... I have my Short Answers shuffled, so when I click next student it just shows me which ever SA question they got first, instead of the one I was grading for the previous student.... This is very annoying... and should be an easy fix. 

Also, please add Turnitin integration, so I can be confident they're not copying and pasting information from google into their short answer responses... Pretty much everything a student does needs to be checked for plagiarism --- from the internet and from students in the current course and previous sections of the course at the university... 

david_white
Community Novice

Amen to integration!  There is a short-term workaround, however.  You can download all responses to an individual question (comes out in a spreadsheet), copy the column with the responses, and paste it into a Word document (and do a little clean-up on formatting).  Next, create a Turnitin assignment called "Exam Scan" or some such and upload the file for scanning. (I often go directly to Turnitin to do the upload.)    This does tend to bog down, however, if you have a significant number of individual short answer questions to handle on a given exam.

amontguire
Community Explorer

I cannot emphasize enough how helpful this feature would be.  Please, please develop it ASAP!

jen_lewon
Community Novice

Canvas--can you let us know what the status of this feature is? Currently, manual grading in SpeedGrader requires 3 clicks and 2 keystrokes (as well as loading a new exam) to advance and grade student submissions for the same question. It is not only inefficient, but it promotes grading inconsistencies since it is impossible to see multiple student responses simultaneously. 

phyllis_zuri
Community Novice

I could not agree more; it's been over a year since I first asked about it and it hasn't gotten easier or more efficient to grade long-response questions. As an ELA teacher it takes me hours to grade just one, and that really hinders me from asking more. There are other platforms with this feature, and it's hard for me to understand why this is such a difficult process.Hoping for some good news that this is on the horizon.New Ideation Stage:  Product Radar

thommill
Community Member

Long overdue update!!!

amontguire
Community Explorer

How long are we going to have to wait on this!?!?!

This is the thing that would actually make speedgrader speedy.  Right now it's anything but.

amontguire
Community Explorer

I know!  Enter the grade, update, wait, next student, wait for it to load again... so frustrating.

amontguire
Community Explorer

"Not-too-distant future?"  I've only been a Canvas user for a year, and I'm already desperate for this.  It's been 2.5 years since your post; when will this be released to the masses?

caryn
Community Member

Hi  @Renee_Carney ‌ and Deactivated user‌,

Thanks for providing information on this feature request. I checked Quizzes.Next, but didn't see any mention of this functionality, at least in the first release of the new tool. Can you provide any additional information about where this feature request lies in the plan for quizzes? 

As you can likely tell, this type of functionality is a significant loss for many instructors. Many of our "legacy" systems had this type of feature, which saves a significant amount of time and helps make the scoring more consistent. In our previous system, we could effectively set a default grade for a specific essay question, then scan through responses and adjust the default grade as needed. That saved a huge amount of time! 

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide! 

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

 

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

srowell
Community Member

I'm also curious whether there are any updates on this feature. And I wanted to add that this would also be helpful for other types of questions that require manual grading, not just essay questions. For example, fill in the blank questions -- because if a student misspells something, the score has to be manually fixed. Related to that, it would be very helpful if this new way of grading by question had a way to sort by whether students got the question correct or not. That isn't relevant to essay questions, but would be very helpful when grading fill in the blank questions, since only incorrect answers need to be reviewed manually.

And I would like to second the earlier comments that the current version of grading by question in Speedgrader is not helpful when using question groups to randomize question order. 

rsxhoxhi
Community Novice

This feature is critical to any useful LMS. Blackboard does this well, arranging question responses on a separate page. You can save individual question grades and feedback without releasing the entire test grade to the student prematurely. There, I can input a grade and feedback in one space, click "save," and move on to the next response. Meanwhile, in Canvas, saving anything requires putting the entire assignment on "mute," then moving test by test. This is not useful. I need questions removed from the context of the rest of the test. Furthermore, I just lost an hour's worth of grades and individual feedback on student responses because I didn't know about the "mute" feature. Not having this grade-by-question feature with all questions responses on one screen sours my opinion of Canvas altogether.

jen_lewon
Community Novice

Please Canvas. Add this feature for both long-answer and short-answer (FIB) question types! 

fuhrmann
Community Member

PLEASE (!!!!) add the ability to look at and grade all student responses to a given question regardless of question type.  I often give partial credit on multiple choice questions; being able to look at all of the class responses to a given question at one time would allow for greater uniformity and accuracy in grading.  This enhancement is at the top of my list.

Steven_S
Community Champion

In addition to grouping quiz questions by question rather than by student, which would speed up grading, it is also important to scan written responses for plagiarism, and that currently requires cutting and pasting one student response at a time into a plagiarism scan.  This cutting and pasting could be sped up if all the essay questions were on one page, but a bulk download would be even better for that specific purpose.  You may be interested in https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/15635-download-essay-questions 

kls505
Community Novice

PLEEEESE!!! This is the single most annoying/inconvenient/inefficient feature of Canvas that I can think of. ANGEL's grade by question put all the responses to an essay question on a single page so you could just go down the page and quickly grade every one. The Canvas Grade by Question is so inefficient in this aspect, that it is totally useless. I don't need or want to download the essay responses. I use the essay questions mostly for the student to upload screenshots of their graphic results.

erica_daniell
Community Explorer

It appears, based on this document, that the grade by question feature is not going to be a part of the "new quizzes" implementation coming soon?  Also, that document makes the claim that it is already available in the current version- something I think most of users would vehemently disagree with.  

This feature has been suggested and begged for for years.  It obtained the votes, Canvas promised to implement it, and then decided not to with no explanation that I am aware of. Now it appears that even with the massive change to this new system, it will still not be included.  Why is this issue being ignored when it is such a crucial issue for so many of us?