Performance and usability upgrades for SpeedGrader is full of bugs

[nuscitpkg]

It pains me to have to post this, but I would advise most institutions to disable the performance and usability upgrades for SpeedGrader.

We have found several bugs since enabling it. Most can be resolved by disabling it. However, our most recent bug discovery cannot be resolved by disabling it.

Issue	Workaround
If Launch SpeedGrader Filtered by Student Group is enabled in course settings, only one group is displayed in SpeedGrader.	In Course > Settings, uncheck Launch SpeedGrader Filtered by Student Group, then click Update course details, or Toggle off Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader.
Display by section showing students in previous section (if they switched sections).	Toggle off Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader.
Comments that are posted will only be visible to the student who submitted on behalf of the group, and the other group members will not be seeing the comment.	Toggle off Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader.
For Turnitin assignments (LTI 1.1), the Turnitin similarity report cannot be launched via the similarity index in SpeedGrader because it requests for a username and login.	The Turnitin similarity reports are accessible via the Assignment Inbox. (If the Assignment Inbox is also requesting for username and login, toggle off Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader.)
For Turnitin assignments (LTI 1.1), instructors and students will see a pop-up asking for username and password when clicking the similarity index in SpeedGrader. They do not see the similarity report.	Toggle off Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader.

The latest bug which has caused us to disable Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader account-wide is that if an assignment has the option for anonymous annotations enabled, and Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader are also enabled at the point of the instructor annotating the submissions in SpeedGrader, the annotations, when posted, are not anonymous.

We further found that if the course does not have Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader enabled, then the anonymous annotations work as expected. The annotations are anonymous when the grades (and comments) are posted.

With most of the bugs, disabling Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader solves the issue.

Not this bug.

Once the annotations are saved while Performance and Usability Upgrades to SpeedGrader is enabled in the course, the annotations stay identifiable. Disabling that setting doesn't make the annotations anonymous.

We have various open tickets with Instructure Support about all these.

Posting this so that everyone is aware.

Disappointed with the QA work done on this.

[nuscitpkg]

Ok, this was moved from the general(?) forum to the SpeedGrader upgrade forum. Good to know I am not alone. Good to be aware of issues that others have found with the SpeedGrader enhancements (sorry, that new name is just too long). Bad that one has to be in this specific sub-forum - I couldn't find it when I was searching for other reports of SpeedGrader enhancement issues - to know that SpeedGrader enhancements is so problematic.

Given this list of issues, I wonder why there hasn't been a general announcement that SpeedGrader enhancements is buggy and careful consideration should be given before enabling it.

I note at least one other post about section enrolments not updating. A cursory search doesn't seem to highlight posts about the other issues we have found.

@YasiAfsharnive, for your comments please. Thank you.

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @nuscitpkg,

Really appreciate you taking the time to outline all of this. I can understand how frustrating it must be to run into so many issues, especially with a feature as important as SpeedGrader.

Most of these are known issues that have only recently become visible with the recent increase in usage during back-to-school. That being said, we are currently working on a fix for all of the issues listed above. In fact, there is already a fix deployed for the section filtering issues that should be in production soon.

Thank you again for sharing such detailed feedback, it’s incredibly helpful as we work through these fixes.

Yasi 

[degensp28]

Thank you for letting us know that Instructure has already identified these issues. Is there a page with a list of known issues so we can make better informed choices?

[YasiAfsharnive]

@degensp28 That's a great call out. Let me make a blog post right now and list out the issues that are currently in progress.