Tests & Assignments

Assignment Grade Settings

Enable Anonymous Grading

You can enable anonymous grading for assignments and tests that don't contain the built-in question types. You may add only text and files to anonymously graded assignments and tests.

Student names are hidden while you grade and are revealed only after you post all grades.

Enable Parallel Grading

You can have specific users in your courses grade sets of assignment submissions. Graders can't see other graders' grades, feedback, annotations on student files, and rubrics. They grade in parallel and provide provisional grades. The default grading roles include instructors, graders, and teaching assistants.

The instructor role is the default final grader or reconciler. The reconciler reviews the provisional grades and determines the final grades that students see. You can assign the ability to reconcile grades to one or more other users with grading privileges and remove your ability to reconcile.

See the Assignment Grade Settings help article for more information about anonymous and parallel grading.

Create and Edit Assignments

Create an Assignment

Assignments are always available to instructors in the Ultra Course View.

You can create assignments alongside other content. Students can access their work next to the content they need, right when they need it. You can also create a group assignment and release it to one or more groups in your course.

See the Create and Edit Assignments help article or view the Create an Assignment video for more information.

New Assignment Page Settings

You can set the different assignment components to customize your assignment. Provide a descriptive title so students can easily find the assignment among your course content. On the Course Content page, the title appears as the link students select to view the materials. If you don't add a title, "New Assignment" and the date appear in the content list. If you don't add content, the assignment won't appear on the Course Content page.

See the New Assignment Page Settings help article for more information.

Add Files and Text blocks to Assignments

Select the plus sign to open the menu wherever you want to add questions, text, or a file. You can add as many text blocks and files as you want.

See the Add Files and Text Blocks to Assignments help article for details.

Add a Time Limit to Assignments

You can add a time limit to an assignment in the Ultra Course View. A time limit can keep students on track and focused on the assignment because each person has a limited amount of time to submit. The assignment attempts are saved and submitted automatically when time is up.

You can also allow students to work past the time limit. Additional time allows students to reconnect if they lose connectivity during their attempts. You can allow extra time to see if the original time you set is enough for students to complete the assignment. When you grade assignments, you can see how much extra time each student used to complete the assignment. If you included questions, you can also see which questions were answered after the initial time limit. Students also see this same information when they access their graded assignments.

At this time, you can't add a time limit to group assignments.

See the Create and Edit Assignments help article for more information.

Edit, Reorder, and Delete Assignments

You can make changes to existing assignments and change where they appear on your Course Content page. Be aware that if you change an existing assignment that students can access, some students may have started their submissions. You can't change the grading schema if you've already started grading.

See the Create and Edit Assignments help article for more information.

Allow Multiple Attempts

In Assignment Settings, you can choose to let students submit more than one attempt. Multiple attempts change how the assignment's final grade is calculated. Choose how you want to calculate the final grade:

• Average of all attempts
• First attempt with a grade
• Attempt with highest grade
• Last attempt with a grade
• Attempt with lowest grade

See the Multiple Attempts help article for more information.

Create Group Assignments

Collaborative learning offers many benefits over traditional instruction. Studies show that when students work as a team, they develop positive attitudes, solve problems more effectively, and experience a greater sense of accomplishment.

You create a group assignment nearly the same way you create assignments for students to complete individually. Gradebook items are created automatically.

See the Group Assignments help article or view the Create Group Assignments video for more information.

Create Offline Assignments (such as oral presentations or lab work)

You can create assessments that appear on the Course Content page that don't require students to upload submissions. You can add instructions, files, a rubric, and goals so students can prepare for the offline work. You can also enable conversations, but you can't add questions or grade anonymously.

Examples of offline work:

• Oral presentations
• Science fair projects
• Acting performances
• Artwork delivered in person
• Face-to-face team building exercises, panel discussions, and debates

See the Collect Submissions Offline help article for more information.

Download Assignments

To accelerate your grading process, you can download students' assessment submissions and view them offline. You can download all or only selected submissions as a single ZIP file. Unzip or expand the file to view the contents. Each submission is saved as a separate file with each student's username.

You can download the content and files that students create and attach in the editor for their submissions.

You can't download content and files attached to assessment questions. For example, if an assessment has only Essay questions, students' answers aren't downloaded. You also can't download discussions, group work, or anonymous submissions.

See the Download Assignments help article or view the Download Assessment Submissions video for more information.

Grade Assignments

Enable Anonymous Grading

You can enable anonymous grading for assignments and tests that don't contain the built-in question types. You may add only text and files to anonymously graded assignments and tests.

Student names are hidden while you grade and are revealed only after you post all grades.

You can't hide or show student names after students open an assignment or test or submit attempts.

Enable Parallel Grading (formerly called Delegated Grading)

You can have specific users in your courses grade sets of assignment submissions. Graders can't see other graders' grades, feedback, annotations on student files, and rubrics. They grade in parallel and provide provisional grades. The default grading roles include instructors, graders, and teaching assistants.

The instructor role is the default final grader or reconciler. The reconciler reviews the provisional grades and determines the final grades that students see. You can assign the ability to reconcile grades to one or more other users with grading privileges and remove your ability to reconcile.

See the Enable Parallel Grading help article for more information.

Assignment Inline Grading

You can choose where you want to start grading!

Want to see how many assignments are ready to grade in all your courses? In the list where your name appears, you have immediate access to all your courses' grading tasks on the global Grades page. All your grading tasks are organized by course. You can quickly scan your progress, set priorities across the board, and even begin grading. No need to navigate to each course to see what's ready for grading.

The page only displays information if you need to take action. You see assignments that are ready to grade or which assignments are overdue for how many students.

Want to narrow your focus? In a course, you can access the course gradebook on the navigation bar. You can see who has made submissions and start grading.

From the activity stream, you're alerted when student submissions are ready for grading. Select the link to go to the gradebook. Or, select an assignment on the Course Content page to see how many students have made submissions.

See the Assignment Inline Grading help article or view the Grading Assignments video for more information.

Grade Group Assignments

After groups submit their assignments, you can access their work from the gradebook or within the course. Assign the same grade to the whole group or grade each team member's contribution separately if everyone didn't contribute equally. You can't change grade settings or group membership after you've started grading.

See the Grade Group Assignments help article for more information.

Best Practices for Group Assessment

A group is a team. Whether you assign students to groups or students select their teammates, hopefully, most students will feel committed to a common goal. Individual accountability is essential for a group to work effectively and produce worthwhile results. When each member of a group receives the same grade, personal accountability becomes an issue.

You may find it a challenge to determine individual grades for a group project. Some instructors assign all members the same grade on their group assignment. This eliminates competition within the group and keeps the focus on collaboration. To lessen students' concern over a shared grade, be sure the group grade is only a small percentage of their total grades.

Or, you can use a variety of assignments to grade each student's contribution. You can ask for peer evaluations, and review each member's test scores, surveys, and reflective writing assignments.

With peer assessment, students participate in the evaluation process. They comment on and judge each group member's work. You can use the feedback to add a participation grade or bonus points to reward group members who fulfilled the outlined requirements.

If group members are aware in advance that they'll have to rate their peers, students may feel a greater sense of involvement and responsibility. The team may produce a higher quality end product and learn more when they know that their evaluators are working alongside them. You can use peer assessment as part of the collaborative process, and not just as a survey submitted at the end when no opportunity for improvement is possible. You can ask for quick checks of how the collaborative process is working.

Ultimately, when you assign a grade for a group's achievement and the contributions of the individual members, consider these questions:

How has the group evaluated its success and each other?
Does the group deliverable meet the assignment's requirements?

See the Best Practice: Group Assessment help article for more information.

Add Rubrics

Rubrics can help ensure consistent and impartial grading and help students focus on your expectations.

A rubric is a scoring tool you can use to evaluate graded work. When you create a rubric, you divide the assigned work into parts. You can provide clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each part, at varying levels of skill.

Students can use a rubric to organize their efforts to meet the requirements of the graded work. When you allow students access to rubrics before they complete their work, you provide transparency into your grading methods.

See the Rubrics help article or watch the Create Rubrics video for more information.

Multiple Assignment Attempts

Multiple attempts can help students stay on track, raise the quality of assignments, and ultimately improve student success and retention. Students can submit drafts and earn credit on improvements. Inform students which assignments allow multiple attempts, and what the expectations and grading policies are for each attempt.

See the Multiple Assignment Attempts help article for more information.

Self and Peer Assessment

Part of a student’s well-rounded learning experience is to take an active role in group activities, group projects, and group presentations. Even though you would expect all group members to be equally involved, we know that some students will do more than others. To find out how well each of the students performed in the group and to round out the “group experience,” allow students to assess the performance of their group. Often, the group is asked to assess each other’s performance using guidelines or a rubric which allows for both quantitative and qualitative feedback. In addition to the peer feedback, each group member could also reflect on their own performance within the group. When combined with the instructor’s assessment, peer- and self-assessment can provide a more comprehensive picture of a student’s performance.

Peer Review for Qualitative Peer Assessments

Peer assessment is a common resource that allows students to review their peers' work through criteria-based evaluation.  It's simple for instructors and students to use.

See the Peer Review for Qualitative Peer Assessments help article or watch the Peer Assessments video for information on why and how to use Peer Assessments.

Preview, Evaluate, and Manage Self and Peer Assessments

You can see the student perspective and how they complete an assessment and evaluate their peers.

You can preview an assessment in two ways from the Assessment Canvas page:

• Choose Submission to view what students see when they initially access the assessment. To preview a question, select its name.
• Choose Evaluation to view what students see when they evaluate their peers' assessments or their own.

Preview pages are read-only. You can't make edits.

See the Preview, Evaluate and Manage Self and Peer Assessments help article for more information.

Use SafeAssign in Assignments

SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works.

SafeAssign is effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool. Use SafeAssign to review assignment submissions for originality and create opportunities to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase.

SafeAssign is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting exact and inexact matching between a paper and source material. Submissions are compared against several databases.

See the Use SafeAssign in Assignments help article for more information.