When grading an assignment (e.g., an essay) I would like the ability to not have the grades visible to students until I've completed all the grading for that assignment. That way all grades are released at the same time, and I'm able to make corrections if needed before having the grade visible. At this point, we are only able to make all grades visible or invisible, but this would mean shutting off all grade accessibility to students if I simply want to make one assignment grade invisible for a short time (while its being graded). I think this would be a helpful feature. Thanks.
Date
Votes
30 comments
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Toby Robinson Official comment Assignments now have a Release Grade setting with the options of Yes, No, and Date. Grade related feedback (test question feedback and annotations for example) will also be governed by this setting.
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Matt Hale Is this not possible? It would be incredibly handy.
Sure, I can note grades and comments in a text document somewhere and then wait to enter them all into Populi at once, but that is pretty unwieldy.
Plus, I love the Populi feature that allows me to annotate pdfs within the interface, but if students can see that before their grades have been entered, that would be really odd.
What I would love to see is a "Release Assignment Grade" button for each assignment. Until the instructor presses that button, all their work (grades, comments, annotations) is saved in Populi but the students are unable to see anything.
That way, if it takes me a few days to get through all the assignments (or if I need to go back and edit something), all the students see their grade at the same time. That seems much more fair.
One extra sub-feature: Since it might be useful to send a comment to a specific student immediately (if, say, they uploaded the wrong file or there's something else they need to do right away), it would be good to have a "Share this comment immediately" option that you can check.
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Peter Neumann This is really a much-needed feature for grading. Many times our teachers will want to grade a few assignments first before getting a sense of the level of the class, and then want to revise their grades before releasing them. This simply isn't possible in the present system. Teachers need the ability to choose when assignment grades are going to be released to their students. This request is now almost a couple of years old. Please consider this option.
Thanks,
Peter Neumann
Academic Dean
Master's College & Seminary -
Donna Harrington I agree. As faculty are using Populi assignments more, they are screaming for the ability to hide each graded assignment until they are ready to release a grade.
We really need this.
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Brad Cowie Agreed
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Sarah Bierle Just checking in if there has been any updates on this as an option? I have had a couple of faculty members inquire about this as we are now using online submissions much more frequently. They would like to be able to submit the grades all at once. Through some testing, we can see that, for an uploaded assignment, as soon as any notation is made on the paper, it shows in real time to the student. So, the request would be to be able to mark up an assignment privately before it is visible to a student, and then also not release any grades until all the papers have been completed.
Thanks for considering.
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Adam Sentz Sarah Bierle - No updates, but it's definitely on my personal list of things I'd like to add. It's more complicated than it might seem as we'd have to go from having one course student grade to having a course student grade that the student can see and a second one that faculty/admin can see.
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Sarah Bierle Thanks for the update. Appreciate it still being on the radar screen!
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Jason Van Vliet Yes, this feature would be very welcome for our faculty. Responding to Adam's comment, I'm quite sure that you know much more about the inner workings of Populi than I do, but I was wondering if it really would be necessary to maintain two "course student grades" within the system. Are the requests more about holding a particular set of assignment grades in some kind of "holding tank" until all the submissions for that particular assigned are marked. Then, once the prof pushes the yet-to-be-made "Release Assignment Grades" button at that point the marks from the holding tank would be merged into the student course mark and the student course mark would be simultaneously updated for both the student and the faculty.
Thanks for considering this possibility.
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Adam Sentz Jason Van Vliet - Unless Populi has both a published and an unpublished final grade faculty wouldn't be able to see how unpublished assignment grades affect the final grade, and, based on our experience, that would not go over well.
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Rev. Gregory Schnakenberg, OP Just to follow up along similar lines, it would be helpful if when grading a test that the points given for a particular question and/or the comments written when grading a question weren't immediately visible to the student until after that student's whole test is graded. Right now it's possible for a student to look and see how many points they've gotten on a particular question or any comments made on a particular question even before their (individual) whole test has been finished and a grade has appeared.
A teacher might reasonably want to go back and revise a point score for a particular question or edit a comment, but right now it's all immediately visible as soon as the teacher saves the grade/comment for a particular question. So, it's essentially the same issue as above, but for individual tests that are in the process of being graded rather than a the whole class' test grades.
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Peter Neumann Yes. We've been requesting this for years. It seems to me this should be a basic feature like it has been in Desire 2 Learn for since as long as I can remember. Teachers need to be able to record grades without making them immediately visible to students. That's what a LMS should enable us to do. Teachers should not need to record grades elsewhere and then later enter them into Populi (or even elsewhere within Populi). That defeats the purpose of one-stop grading within the system. Please Populi help us on this one! 🙂
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Adam Sentz Rev. Gregory Schnakenberg, OP - That sounds like a different feature request to me.
Peter Neumann - I'm with you. This is one of those deceptively complicated improvements that Populi should absolutely do, but a surprisingly small number of people have requested. We've made a lot of LMS improvements since this was initially requested, and we aren't done yet.
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Jason Van Vliet Now that we have Student View and Duplicate Assignments (thank you very much!) can this one be the next feature release on the LMS side of Populi? One can always ask, and hope... right?
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Tannique Muir Registering my support for this feature to be added.
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Andrew Gabriel I would like to affirm that this is a feature that we would find helpful as well. It would be especially helpful if an instructor has a TA marking tests for her, and the instructor wants to review the comments and grades before the students see them.
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Larry Tarka We also would love to see this feature implemented.
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Mrs. Shira Hochheimer This is the top feedback from instructors about their concerns with entering grades on Populi.
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Donna Harrington This issue comes up EVERY quarter from about half of my faculty.
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Rev. Gregory Schnakenberg, OP Just looping back around to say this is still needed/desired.
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Jason Van Vliet Adam Sentz "... but a surprisingly small number of people have requested."
Yes, 15 votes (at the time of posting) is not terribly high, but I think there is a reason for that.
Obviously, faculty are most frustrated by the lack of this feature. As Donna Harrington says, "EVERY quarter from about half of my faculty." But in my experience, not so many faculty members are on these forums. Admin staff and perhaps deans of schools using Populi are well-represented in these forums, but many faculty are off doing their teaching, marking, research, and writing, and therefore, they are unlikely to post suggestions in the Feature Request forum, let alone take the time to upvote certain feature requests.
So, my gut tells me that there is a very large disparity between the number of faculty who really, badly want this feature, and the 15 people who have taken the time to upvote this request. Obviously, I can't prove that scientifically, but perhaps this can be taken into consideration when Populi is making decisions about which features to prioritize for the Dev team. Thanks!
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Mrs. Shira Hochheimer My faculty has expressed reservations grading on Populi and keep a separate gradebook until they have finalized all their grades. They don't want to have to keep grades in two places. This workflow is very challenging for us as admins as we want grades to be uploaded regularly not at the end of the course.
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Nicole Mathy, Psy.D. My institution recently started using Populi and the lack of this feature is one of the reasons I am considering continuing to use Canvas for my courses and just adding grades in Populi when the course is complete. The lack of this feature almost forces you to keep a second record of grades to avoid the onslaught of student emails when a few people can see their grades before others.
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Donna Harrington My president is asking me to set progress visibility to "not visible" because of the same reasons you indicated.
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David Balzer Adam Sentz "... but a surprisingly small number of people have requested."
I am adding my strong interest for this feature - timed release of grades. I also have spoken directly with numerous faculty colleagues at our institution and they agree. It seems odd that a request which has been made for 10 years by faculty is deemed as "surprisingly small". Please place a priority on this feature. -
Jason Van Vliet Adam Sentz I notice that this feature request now has the "Planned" tag. If I'm not mistaken that is a more recent, and certainly encouraging, development. Thank-you! May "Planned" become "Completed" just as soon as reasonably possible.
While the devs are doing their thing in that area of Populi's code, perhaps they can also take care of this Feature Request which would also make many faculty members happy, I'm quite sure: Add option to include late penalty in assignment grading – Populi Knowledge Base (populiweb.com)
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Jason Van Vliet It moved from Planned to Complete far quicker than I anticipated. Thank-you! This will make such a difference for our faculty, especially when it comes to marking term papers, which often takes days rather than hours. It will be so much more professional to release the grades all at once, and so much more efficient not to have to hold back the marks in some kind of manual way only to have to re-do part of the work later.
Thanks again!
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Jason Van Vliet Not to take anything away from the gratitude expressed in the previous comment, but it seems to me there is a small glitch. When I set a certain assignment for "Not" released, then a handy little option appears in the Gradebook as illustrated below. Nice!
However, I would expect that when I toggle to "Released" that only the released assignments appear in the Gradebook; however, nothing changes when I toggle it. Perhaps that part is not fully implemented yet or I misunderstand how it works.
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Adam Sentz Jason Van Vliet - That toggle should change just whether released Grades appear or not. All the assignments will show either way. So if you have unreleased grades you can see what grades look like to students. If that's not how it's working for you please reach out to Support with some details so we can take a look.
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Jason Van Vliet After having used this feature for almost an entire semester now, including working with on various assignments with a TA, I just want to underline my gratitude for this feature. It's straightforward, works as advertised, and makes marking a much better experience. Well done!
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