Because I had a desire to ‘grade’ some items in Populi – I have devised a ‘work-around’ that I think (with a few modifications on your end) would make a great addition to the LMS. My use is for the grading of public speeches – but it would be handy for written papers as well.
Using a grading rubric is particularly important and I am now using a Populi test as my rubric instrument. I have made up multiple choice questions and assigned values to each of the four or five answers.
On the day the speech is to be given, I will ask the student to use my laptop and log into their Populi account. I will then “take the test for them,” evaluating their oral speaking skills used the multiple choice questions from this test. I have the test answers set up so that the first (best) response is worth 100% of the value of the question, the second best response is worth 75%, third best is worth 50% - and so forth. When I submit the test, they will automatically get the grade/score – and later they will be able to go back into the test and see both the entire rubric and how I evaluated them on each category.
I think this is going to work every well, but it might work even better if (at some point) it was incorporated as a standard Populi feature. It would be great if you could add another assignment type “Rubrics,” which would be a clone of the current “Tests.” Most ideally, items in the “Rubric” category could be filled out only by the teacher of the course – but the results seen by the student.
