Speedgrader Refresh

[ryest]

Hi, I use assignments for students to upload their math exam.  They upload it as a single PDF.  I try to be consistent when grading, so I grade the same problem for each student before moving on to the next student.  This allows me to compare answers between students.  However, when I go back to another student's exam, the exam has been refreshed to page one.  Why?  If I am on page 7, I have to scroll through a lot for each student just to compare answers / scoring.  There is so much time wasted in this.  Why does the page last visited reset?  How do I stop that?

[Update] It is refreshing at an alarming amount of time, that it is almost making the service completely useless.  There are problems that weren't graded due to having to find where I left off and doing and erroneously picking up at the wrong problem.  So not only do I have to scroll through from the beginning every time I encounter a student's problem, but now I have to scroll through and ensure that every problem has been graded.  This is beyond absurd.  

[Update #2] What should have taken about 2 hours at most has taken over six hours.  I know some disciplines allow for evaluating a student's work independent of other student's work (e.g., writing essays).  Evaluation of mathematics needs consistency of evaluation; cross referencing between students' method of solution is paramount.  Speedgrader's necessity to refresh back to the top of the exam inhibits this.

[James · Accepted solution]

 @ryest  

Math and science teachers often feel a lot of frustration with Canvas. It's because we want to do things it wasn't designed for.

Canvas' ability to grade one question at a time is for quizzes but it sounds like you're just using a regular assignment submission. You could use a file upload, but then you wouldn't be able to even see the exams in SpeedGrader, you would have to download them.

One thing I have started doing with my math exams since the covid outbreak is to use a rubric with a criterion for each question. Then I can tell which questions I have graded and which ones I haven't graded. It also adds up all the points for me. I do have to decide how much each question is worth and how much I'm going to take off ahead of time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing as my rubric is loose enough that it still allows lee-way in grading.

It's also easier for the students to see exactly how they got the grade they got. I used to say "you missed 60% of this question" but didn't tell them how much the question was worth ahead of time. I have tinkered with adjusting point values after the exam and even set up a huge solver problem in Excel to assign points in a way to optimize the average grade for the students. Strangely -- or not -- it came out pretty close to the points I would have awarded anyway, so I stopped doing that and just went back to me actually knowing what things should be worth.

Since switching to online grading, I no longer grade each question for all students. I used to do one page (not one problem) at a time for some exams, but it's a similar concept.

If you want to do grade one question at a time, then you can download all of the responses, print them out, grade them by hand, scan them, save them over the original names and then upload them back into Canvas for the students to see your feedback. Oh, and you still have to enter the grades. That hassle is not worth grading one question at a time, so I made the conversion to grading an exam at a time.

From a technical perspective, Canvas doesn't currently store the page that you're currently viewing when you switch from one student to another. I looked at what would be needed for a third party to do this. I have written other stuff that enhances SpeedGrader and messes with the internals. I think it could be done, but it wouldn't be simple or quick. They have their own PDF viewer/annotator called DocViewer. Adobe Acrobat documentation says you can add #page=3 to the end of the URL to have it jump to page 3 of a PDF, but that doesn't work with DocViewer. That means that someone writing this would have to store the page number that was being viewed (if that's available ... I didn't check on that) in memory and then wait for the page to load when it's revisited and jump to that page.

You would also need to pay attention to the grade one question at a time setting in Canvas, except that setting isn't settable unless it's a quiz. I wouldn't always want to jump to page 3 because I don't grade question by question.

There is a feature request that someone made a week ago to add this functionality to Canvas. You may want to go there and lend your support for the idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/16526-speedgrader-return-to-same-location-in-document