One question, every learner in turn

The gradebook can be read the other way round: instead of one learner’s whole course, one question’s whole class.

It is almost always the faster way to mark, and it produces more consistent marks.

How to get to it

Open Manage → Gradebook and choose the question’s heading rather than a learner’s cell. You get every answer to that question, one at a time, and page through them.

It works for every question type, not only written ones. That matters more than it sounds — it is how you review whether a multiple-choice question did its job.

Why it is better than going learner by learner

One standard, held once. Marking twenty answers to the same question means holding one judgement in your head. Marking twenty learners’ whole courses means picking that judgement up and putting it down twenty times, and it drifts.

You see the question’s real failure mode. If fifteen of twenty gave the same wrong answer, the question is probably ambiguous or the lesson did not cover it. That is invisible one learner at a time and obvious here.

It is quicker. No navigating between people, and no re-reading the prompt twenty times.

Answers that are not words

An ordering or matching answer is shown as the actual items in the order the learner chose, not as the positions they are stored as. You should never be reading a row of numbers.

What to do with what you find

Reviewing a question this way tends to produce one of three conclusions:

• It worked. Most got it, the ones who did not misunderstood something specific.
• The question is ambiguous. Mark the reasonable readings correct — see Overriding a mark — and reword it.
• The teaching did not land. Nobody got it. That is a lesson to revisit, not a cohort to fail.

The last two are worth acting on while you are there. A question left ambiguous costs every future learner their one attempt at it.