Comparison of old Speedgrader with New Speedgrader: issues and undocumented changes

[ellen_peters]

I have done some more testing and compared the new Speedgrader with the old Speedgrader. I found several issues and undocumented changes.

These are the issues (which only occur in the new Speedgrader, not in the old interface):
1. We have the language pack English UK. Therefore the time notation should be according to the 24 hours clock, not the 12 hours clock with am and pm. In the new Speedgrader, all times shown in the 12 hours clock with am and pm.

2. The following options are missing in the RCE for assignment comments: Image upload, Math editor, the option 'course link' under the link button (only 'external link' is shown).

3. For an assignment with peer review and a rubric: if a rubric is already filled in by a student, the teacher can not add an assessment as well. After filling in the rubric by the teacher and clicking on the button 'Submit assessment', nothing happens. The rubric assessment by the teacher is not saved. This happens with both classic rubrics and Enhanced rubrics (tested in Firefox and Chrome).

4. Group assignment in a course with more than 10 groups that are named group 1, group 2 etc: the groups are not sorted in the order of group 1, group 2, group 3 in the group list. Instead, the order is group 1, group 10, group 11..., group 19, group 2, group 20...

5. Group assignment: in the blue bar at the top you see [x]/[n] Students, this should be [x]/[n] Groups.

6. If a student has a name with an apostrophe in it, the apostrophe is shown as ' in the Student list. For example: D'Angelo is shown as D'angelo (and lower case a instead of A).

The undocumented changes are:

7. A submission that has status 'late': in the old Speedgrader you see the Due date & time below the 'Days' field. In the new Speedgrader the due date is not shown anymore. Is this an intended change?

8. The 'Student viewed document' date/time indication is not shown anymore. Is this an intended change?

9. The colour of the similarity score icon for percentages between approximately 25 and 50 is a kind of olive in the old Speedgrader. In the new Speedgrader, all percentages between approximately 25% and 75% are orange. I don't know the exact boundaries of the colour categories, but in new Speedgrader there is one colour categorie less (the olive one) than in the new Speedgrader. Why?

10. The font in Speedgrader has changed, including the font in the comments. Also, in the old Speedgrader an Enter resulted in white space between the lines, now you need to give two Enters. These two changes make the comments much more difficult to read, in my opinion. See for example this text:

Why has the font been changed?

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @ellen_peters 

Thank you so much for your thorough testing and clear report. This is all incredibly helpful. We’ve logged each of the issues and questions you raised, and our team is actively investigating them. I do not believe #7-9 are intended changes, but we're double checking and will revert back to the old behavior if needed. We’ll follow up as soon as we have updates. Thanks again for helping us improve SpeedGrader!

[jchapes]

Hello! Thanks for the information from your testing. I got online to report the same thing as #8 in your list, so I'm kinda happy to hear that this is an issue for other users too. I had wondered if it was intended to leave this piece of information out in the upgrade. 

[b_w_reid]

We were just about to look at the new feature and do some testing, I'm so thankful that I checked the community pages first. Thank you so much for your thorough testing @ellen_peters . Some of these items are major concerns for us moving forwards, and I'm not sure we'd be happy to add this feature until there was some resolution on some of these issues.

[YasiAfsharnive]

@b_w_reid @ellen_peters @jchapes 

We’ve reviewed these findings and wanted to let you all know that our team is actively working through these issues and prioritizing fixes.

Some of the items you flagged, like the time format, RCE limitations, rubric assessment behavior, group sorting, and apostrophe handling, are clear bugs that we're now tracking. We’re also reviewing the undocumented changes you noted to determine which were intentional and which may need adjustments.

We really appreciate you taking the time to document everything so clearly, it goes a long way in helping us improve the experience!!

[ellen_peters]

Hi @YasiAfsharnive , thanks for the update. I hope the issues can be fixed soon. 

[CameronRay1]

Thanks so much for reporting these issues. I want to follow up with where we are in addressing them since a few people are interested in this discussion.

1. Respect 24 hour locales: Resolved (Beta)
2. RCE missing buttons: Image upload, Math editor, the option 'course link': In Progress
3. Teacher Cannot Save Rubric Assessment if Peer Assessment Exists: Resolved (Beta)
4. Group Sorting Logic in New SpeedGrader is Incorrect: Resolved (Beta)
5. Group Assignment UI Shows Student Count Instead of Group Count: Resolved (Not yet deployed)
6. Apostrophes Rendered as HTML Entity in Student Names: Resolved (Beta)
7. Missing Due Date Below ‘Days Late’ Label: In Progress
8. The 'Student viewed document' date/time indication is not shown anymore: Resolved (Beta)
9. Similarity Score Icon Color Category Changed: Resolved (Beta)
10. The font in Speedgrader has changed: Requires further discovery

Items marked with Beta have the fix shipped to the beta environment and will be going out to production very soon. That means we are still looking into 3 issues:

• RCE missing buttons
• Missing Due Date Below ‘Days Late’ Label
• The font in Speedgrader has changed

Out of those, we project the second one will be resolved soon. 

Again, thank you for reporting these discrepancies, and feel free to follow up with anything else you find.

[ellen_peters]

Hi @CameronRay1 , thank you for this detailed update. It is much appreciated 🙂. I have tested the issues that are resolved on Beta according to your post. For the following issues I didn't see any difference, they still occur on our Beta environment:
3. Teacher Cannot Save Rubric Assessment if Peer Assessment Exists

8. The 'Student viewed document' date/time indication is not shown anymore.

I also found a new issue that is related to the issue of the readability of the assignment comments. If the comments include a typed or copied URL address, that link is clickable in old Speedgrader. In new Speedgrader, the link is not clickable. Note: links that are created with the RCE external link button work fine.

[CameronRay1]

Ah you're absolutely correct on those two that are not resolved in Beta, I actually haven't done the Beta deploy for those fixes yet. I'm hoping to have those out by end of week, barring one unresolved issue.

Re: clickable links in SG comments, I'll make a ticket for that and we will address.

[dbrace]

@YasiAfsharnive and @CameronRay1,

Not specifically for the items that @ellen_peters raised but in this feature group, in the "Resources" section, there is a change log at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Upgrades-for-SpeedGrader/Modernized-SpeedGrader-Change-Log/ta-p/6....

Is the change log going to be used?

I ask because it says [coming soon] but there is nothing in it.

-Doug

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hey @dbrace, thanks for pointing that out. I'll make sure to log and share changes in the community when we start making them. I've removed the article for the time being to avoid any confusion. Thanks again! 

[HeatherHarris2]

I have another item that we recently noticed, when grading an Essay by question using New Quizzes in SpeedGrader with Performance Enhancements, the button to Update and save the score is now at the bottom of the page, instead of next to the question like it was previously.  This takes significant time while grading. Could this also be fixed?

[llomax]

Here are some of the issues we are seeing in the New Speedgrader Enhancement that I am getting multiple reports on: 

• Grade by Question - This option does not work or show up by the question to move to the next or previous student, it is missing.
• File Upload Assignments - Teachers are unable to see multiple uploads without clicking on the Details tab. It is not intuitive, and they hide under the tab. This needs to be moved back to be more visible or put some sort of notification that they are behind the tab. 
• Copyleaks flags - These are also nested under the Details tab on certain assignment types - again not intuitive or consistent with other assignment types. Teachers have to look in different places depending on the submission type. 
• When teachers access an assignment to grade from the To-Do list link, they grade all the submissions and then return to the home screen. The To-do list will still show that at least 1 student still needs to be graded (even when they have already been graded). The teacher has to go back to the Speedgrader and refresh the page for it to register. 
• When grading a New Quiz, the score field does not automatically update when a teacher updates or grades a question type. They again have to refresh or move to another student and then back. This is time consuming, and the score needs to update upon grading. 
• Under the Speedgrader options, when teachers set the sort option to "sort by submission status" it is not organizing the list in alphabetical order. Why would this not be the default for this setting when you have also added an option to sort by "Randomize students within submission status". That is what the 1st option is currently doing and needs to be fixed. Teachers want and need to be able to sort both ways for those with submissions. 
• Assignments are automatically hidden in the Speedgrader. Not sure why when the settings to hide are off or have not been set. 

Thank you for looking into these issues.