Grading and interacting with student assignments

In this article, you'll learn how to grade and interact with the different types of student assignments. You'll start on the assignment's grading page, where you can enter grades, link to the assignment detail for individual students, leave feedback and notes, upload/download files, edit assignment info, and view assignment stats.

How to get to an assignment

You can get to the assignment grading page a few different ways:

• When there is new activity on an assignment, you'll see a clickable alert on the course Dashboard view.
• The main Assignments view, of course, links to all of the course's assignments. next to an assignment indicates new activity.
• You can also link to assignments from the associated test, graded discussion, or lesson.

The assignment grading page

• Click a student's name to view his assignment detail—which shows you his assignment submissions and lets you comment back and forth with one another.
• indicates that there are unread comments or files on that student's feed.
• indicates that you've already viewed any comments or files on that student's feed.
• Click download assignment files to download a .zip folder of all the files (from all students) that have been uploaded to this assignment.
• If you've used a rubric to grade a submission, click to view the score.
• Click the grade release notice to change the setting. For example, if you have it set to No so grades, et. al., remain hidden until you've finished grading all student submissions, click the notice so you can change it to Yes once you're done with grading.

Enter grades

1. Click Enter Grades. The fields under Grade/Percent and Letter Grade will open up for editing.
2. Enter the number of points the student earned under Grade/Percent. If a student earned 42 points on a 50-point test, enter 42—NOT 84! Populi will automatically generate the percent/letter grades for you.
3. Alternatively, you can select a Letter Grade from the drop-down. Populi will automatically generate a Grade/Percent.
   • If you're using a rubric, have a look at this article.
4. When you're done grading, click Save Grades.
   • Populi automatically saves your grades every few minutes while you work.

Excusing a student from the assignment

To excuse a student from the assignment, you can use any of these three options:

• Leave the assignment grade blank for that student.
• Type "E" in the Grade/Percent field
• Select Excused from the Letter Grade drop-down

Download files

If your students have uploaded files to the assignment, you can download those files individually or all at once.

• Individual files: Click the student's name to go to the assignment detail (see below), find the file, and click its name to download it.
• All files: On the main assignment page, click Download Assignment Files. This creates a .zip folder bearing the name of the assignment; within you'll find folders for each student and all files they've uploaded to the assignment.

Assignment detail

The assignment detail view includes a feed where you can interact with the student about the assignment and enter grades for his work. Different types of assignments will show you different options in the assignment detail (the assignment pictured above is a file-type assignment). Read more about your options for...

• Graded discussions
• Peer review assignments
• Grading tests
• Annotating essay and file assignments

Here's a general look at your options on student assignment detail pages:

• On file-type assignments, if the student has uploaded a submission in the feedback section, click and select Set as student submission.
• Click to delete any comment or file.
• In the right column of the detail screen, you can also enter grades (see below).
• Use the arrows or the drop-down to navigate to another student's assignment detail.
• Click the assignment name to return to the main assignment page.

Here's how to enter grades...

1. Click Enter grades.
2. Enter a number grade or select a letter grade.
3. Write a comment, upload a file, and check if you wish to keep the note internal(that is, hidden from the student).
4. Click Save to finish grading, or Save and go to the next student to continue working.

Here's how to give feedback to your students:

1. Type or copy-paste your comments in the text area.
2. Attach a file to your comment if you wish.
3. Check to make this an internal note(visible to you but not the student) or leave un-checked to make it Public(visible to the student). Internal notes are available to you when entering course comments on the final grade page.
4. When you're done, click Submit.

Edit Info

The Info panel contains the assignment's settings. Click edit to change any of these details. Read this article to learn how to give students exceptions for due dates and availability.

If you're changing the assignment's type:

• Test assignments can only be changed if students have not yet taken the test.
• File and essay assignments can only be changed if there are no student submissions.
• Grade-only assignments can be changed at any time.