Fasten your seat belts Crowdmarkers, we have a big product announcement! In January 2018 we will be launching our new Flexible grading feature. This has been in the works for quite some time based on numerous requests from our community of educators.
Flexible grading will enable your team to grade multiple questions on a single page as well as questions that span multiple pages. This brings ultimate flexibility to exam creation but also means that we’ve made some changes to the grading interface.
Question placement
Facilitators will be able to define multiple questions on a page and questions that span multiple pages. After the template is uploaded to Crowdmark the Facilitator can set the location of each question on the exam with one click. The benefit is that scores are more granular and specific to each question (rather than the page) and graders working on two different questions on the same page will not collide.
Grading interface redesign
The biggest change you’ll notice is that we have removed the grading grid and have replaced it with a faster way to start grading. Each question will have its’ own box on the Dashboard, giving you direct access to grade it along with helpful stats and a grading progress indicator.
The redesigned grading interface allows graders to easily navigate between student exam booklets and questions. Scores are shown directly on students’ work. This makes it closer to the experience of grading on paper with all the benefits of digital grading. Facilitators will still be able to delegate one question per grader if that’s your preferred grading workflow and now they can each work independently on the questions with no collisions or cloning required.
Here’s an overview of the new navigation:
- The right sidebar shows the current question above the score and keypad, as well as the current booklet (“student” is now referred to as “booklet”). Use the left and right arrows or keyboard shortcuts to navigate between students’ booklets. The “Next ungraded” button is now located at the bottom of the sidebar.
- Navigating through a student’s booklet is similar to using a text editor. Pages are arranged vertically with an inline label for each question. You can scroll down to view a student’s full assessment. You can switch between questions by clicking the question labels or using keyboard shortcuts. On the left side of the page there is a drawer with page thumbnails to help you navigate between pages quickly. This can be hidden to provide more room for grading.
- Clicking “Booklet #” in the right sidebar opens a menu allowing you to “go to” a specific booklet number or student (only Faciltators will see the student option). This is a useful shortcut for graders working on a specific range of booklets.
- You can filter by question and score (or range of scores) in addition to graders and tags.
Additional features
- “Next ungraded” now navigates sequentially through ungraded booklets rather than a random order.
- In the comment library, select a comment and click “Used X times” to activate the filter tool to show only evaluations using that comment.
- Max. points are shown in the score block in the right sidebar. If the score entered is over the max. points, the block will turn yellow as a warning but the score will still be allowed.
- The small bar above “Next ungraded” shows grading progress for the current question.