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.
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 effectively 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
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.