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Grading a written answer

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Most question types grade themselves. Written answers cannot, and they wait for you.

Finding them

Open Manage → Gradebook. Written answers appear as waiting rather than as a score. Choose one to read it and score it.

If several people have answered the same question, take the question rather than the person: open it once and page through every answer in turn. Grading twenty answers to one question is quicker and more consistent than opening twenty students, because you are holding one standard in your head instead of twenty.

Scoring

  1. Read the answer.
  2. Enter a score. It cannot exceed what the question is worth — a question worth 10 will not accept 12.
  3. Add feedback if it will help. The student sees it with their result.
  4. Save.

The score is recorded against that student and that question, and the gradebook stops showing it as waiting.

Overriding an automatic grade

You can change any grade, not only the ones you gave. This matters most on the question types that grade themselves strictly:

  • Fill in the blank ignores capitals, extra spaces and a trailing full stop — and nothing else. A correct answer phrased differently is graded wrong, and that is the case overriding exists for.
  • Choose all that apply, put in order and matching pairs are all-or-nothing. A student who got five of six pairs right scores zero, and you may well think that is worth something.

The grade you give replaces the automatic one. There is no partial credit from the machine on purpose: scoring stays black and white and predictable, and a person decides when it should not be.

A good standard to hold

Two things are worth deciding before you start rather than part-way through a pile:

  • What a full grade requires. Writing it down for yourself keeps the fortieth answer scored like the first.
  • Whether you are grading the understanding or the expression. Both are defensible. Mixing them silently is not, and it is what students notice.

Assistants can do everything on this page. It is the whole reason the role exists — grading without the authority to rewrite the course.