Anonymous Marking for Assessments

This guide will show how to enable Anonymous Marking for Assessments in VU Collaborate. This is a great way to mitigate the effects of hidden or unconscious bias when grading or providing formative feedback on assignments. Please be aware that while this can remove the student identifiers from the dropbox it can not remove them from the word document. As such you will need to ensure that students do not include their names or student number in the word document. 

Before enabling Anonymous Marking, you will first have to know the steps to create an Assessment Dropbox. For steps on how to do this please see the following guide:

• Creating an Assessment Dropbox.

Below are the steps for setting up an Anonymous Dropbox:

• Enable Anonymous Marking During Dropbox Creation
• Viewing Submissions and Publishing Feedback
• Identifying Students Who Have Not Submitted

 This can only be set up by block convenors in the master space.

 

Step One: Enable Anonymous Marking During Dropbox Creation

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1.  Anonymous marking can be enabled during the creation of your dropbox. Click on the dropdown menu from the Evaluation & Feedback option to reveal more settings.

2.  From the options provided, tick the checkbox for "Hide student names during assessment" under Anonymous Marking. 

 

1.2 Enable Anonymous Marking on an Existing Dropbox

Anonymous marking can be enabled on an existing dropbox also. To do this, the dropbox must not have any submissions made by students prior.

1.  View the dropbox that you would like to change and click the drop-down arrow for further options. Click Edit Folder.

2.  Click on the dropdown menu on Evaluation & Feedback menu and tick the checkbox for "Hide student names during assessment" under Anonymous Marking. 

3.  Once you have enabled anonymous marking either on an existing dropbox or in a new dropbox, it will have an icon next to the title of the dropbox to indicate that the hiding student names during assessment setting is enabled.

 

Step Two: Viewing Submissions and Publishing Feedback

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1. Click on the title of the dropbox to view the current submissions. The folder will display student files in the delivery space like the following:

2.  Anonymous assessment dropboxes require that all submission grades and feedback are published at the same time. The usual publish buttons are greyed out. Once you have completed the feedback and grades click Publish All Feedback to publish all the grades at once.

 

 

Step Three: Identifying Students Who Have Not Submitted

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In some situations, you may wish to identify students who have not made a submission to the dropbox. To do this you can set up an intelligent agent that can pull the names of the students who haven't submitted and email them to you as a list. For more detailed information on intelligent agents, refer to the following guide No submission to Dropbox - Intelligent Agent.

Intelligent agents need to be enabled in the Delivery Space.

To generate a list of the students who haven't submitted to the anonymous dropbox (including their names) you can run the intelligent agent linked above in a practice run.

1.  Navigate to Space Admin > Intelligent Agents.

2.  After creating the intelligent agent click on the drop-down arrow and click on Practice Run.

3.  After a few minutes, this will generate a list of students who are yet to submit to this dropbox. Click on the number of users identified to access the list.