Assignments: View and evaluate assignment submissions
There are a number of different options for reviewing and evaluating student assignment submissions, as well as options for publishing grades and feedback.
We recommend reviewing these options when creating your assignments, so you can have these strategies in mind. Some of the settings are best completed before the grading has begun.
Assignments can be found in the top navigation, under Assessment. If it isn't there, review how to enable course tools.
If you have students who have yet to submit an assignment to a submission folder, you can email all those students at once.
This is a useful workflow to apply if you don't want the students to see any of their results (grades, feedback, rubrics) across any of the tools in Brightspace (Grades, Assignments and Progress). You may wish to do this while grading, so you can release all feedback to the class at the same time.
Outline of the required steps:
- Hide the grade item
- "Save draft" when grading the assignments
- Once all submissions are in, hide the assignment
- Publish the assignment grades and feedback
Important! This step should only be taken once all of the assignment submissions are in. If there are any students who still need to submit their assignment, this will not work.
If you are not ready to publish all feedback yet, and want to publish the feedback in batches, please see the section on publishing feedback on this page.
The annotation tool in D2L Brightspace assignments allows you to mark up a student's submission as a means of providing feedback in-situ.
IMPORTANT: Annotations are not recommended for use with assistive technology. If your students use assistive technology, consider providing written feedback in the feedback field.
The "Annotations" feature can be enabled in the assignment editor, in the Evaluation & Feedback panel.
If you have co-instructors, TAs and/or graders in your course shell, and you have already set up those users in this assignment with roles as evaluators/publishers and allocated team members to specific students (or groups of students), the process described above to view, provide a score and add feedback are the same.
The interface may look slightly different, depending on your role in this assignment
What each member of the grading team sees when they click on a student's assignment submission may vary slightly, depending on their role, or if they are only assigned to some of the students.
If you don't wish to review or update any grading/feedback before publishing, go to the "Submissions" page for the assignment, and you can bulk publish all grading/feedback for all students, but please try to avoid doing this, as it is easy to accidentally publish ungraded submissions, and then miss grading some students. If you do this, the only way to find ungraded students will be to view each submission to confirm.
Multiple Evaluator Mode (optional, not relevant for most)
NOTE: We only recommend "Multiple Evaluator Mode" for well-coordinated grading teams, as there is some risk of incomplete student assessment.
While most grading scenarios are best suited to choosing the "One Shared Evaluation" setting, you may find that you wish to use an "independent multi-marker" approach, where multiple evaluators each complete a separate evaluation of each student's work. Those independent evaluations must be manually aggregated by the publisher before being released to the student.
If you wish to do this, you must choose this setting prior to starting to evaluate any student submissions. You cannot change this once you start grading.
Reminder: Only people hired by HR, who have an appropriate role in the course shell (which allows access to private student information) can be an evaluator in an assignment. These roles include Instructor, TA and Grader.
If you set up a grading team for the assignment, but the team members have changed
Occasionally, there is a staffing change, and you may lose or gain a co-instructor, TA or grader, after you have already set up your assignment to use that team.
If a team member is removed from your shell, any students that were previously allocated to them in an assignment will no longer be allocated to that person.
If you manually remove someone's ability to evaluate or publish grades in an assignment, the same is true, they will no longer be allocated to the students that they were previously allocated to.
If you add a new instructor, TA or grader to your shell, they will not automatically be added to the evaluation team in each assignment.
While D2L does its best to reallocate students to the teaching team that is assigned, we've found that their automatic allocations do not always work in the expected way. This can result in some students having more than one evaluator assigned to them, or some students with no evaluator.
If you have removed or added someone to your grading team, we strongly recommend that you follow the instructions found on our "Deliver online assignments" page to go through the process again to select evaluators and publishers, and allocate evaluators to learners. This way, you can be confident that the settings are correct, and there will be fewer misunderstandings within your evaluation team.
Advise your students to remove their name and all identifying information from the assignment submissions and filenames.
Turnitin should not be used with anonymous grading, as it displays the students' names.
Tips for the effective use of anonymous grading:
- Publishing of evaluated submissions ends anonymous grading. if you are accepting late submissions, they will not be anonymous.
- Grading may take place over multiple sessions, but publishing of graded submissions should be done all at once, to maintain anonymity.
What if the student didn't submit their assignment?
While you cannot submit the student's paper on their behalf - and therefore cannot use tools such as anotations - you can still provide the student with a score, completed rubric (if used) and written feedback.
Evaluators can provide the following for students who did not submit their assignment:
- A score grade
- A completed rubric (if applicable)
- Feedback
Evaluators will not be able to utilize the following tools without the student's submission:
- Annotations
- Turnitin
NOTE: While the above is an acceptable process, a much better solution is to add the student to "Special Access" with a different start/end date/time, allowing them to upload their assignment submission, so that all of your students' submissions reside within your D2L Brightspace course shell. This ensures easy follow-up, in the case of any kind of dispute.
Publishing feedback can serve two purposes:
- It pushes the grades into the gradebook, if you have connected the assignment to a grade item.
- It provides the students with their scores, feedback and rubric evaluations.
If you only want to push the grades into the gradebook, and you do not want the students to see the results, please see the workflow above to hide the assignment results from the students.
The steps below outline two options:
- Publish all feedback
- Bulk publish feedback for select students' submissions
Instructors may provide feedback directly within a student's submission (e.g. making track changes in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat) and upload the feedback as an attachment. See the tutorial for instructions to download assignment submissions.
It is possible to upload all feedback files simultaneously, however the naming convention must be accurate so Brightspace can assign the correct file to the correct student.
The instructions outlined below can mostly be applied to both Mac and Windows.
PC Users will follow the steps with the following adjustments:
- After downloading the files and adding feedback to the documents, save the files and folders with the same names as downloaded. Do not change any of the file/folder names. Zip the folder and proceed to Step 3.
- When adding the feedback files in Step 5, simply add the zipped folder of all the feedback files.