Manual Grading: New User Interface and Points Allocation

A major overhaul of manual grading features has just been deployed to all courses. Instructors and TAs now have more flexibility to grade question components manually, and to more easily review and provide feedback on students work.

Assessment questions can now be assigned a combination of auto-graded and manual point components. This combination can be used in questions that require some level of human review, such as questions that require a description of the progress to arrive at the result ("show your work"), review of code style and comments in coding questions, or essay-type justification of student answers. Assessments can be set up to use this combination in individual questions:

"zones": [
    {
        "title": "Manually graded questions",
        "questions": [
            {"id": "essayQ", "manualPoints": 10},
            {"id": "autoPlusManualQ", "autoPoints": 7, "manualPoints": 15},
        ]
    }

Additional details on this configuration can be found in the PrairieLearn documentation.

Manual grading has also received a new user interface, in addition to the existing grade upload features. It is now possible to manually grade student submissions directly in the PrairieLearn user interface, allowing course staff to provide feedback on individual questions. This is done using the new "Manual Grading" tab in assessments. Graders can be assigned to grade individual questions, and can direct answers that require further clarification to head TAs or instructors. Students have a clearer view of which questions are graded automatically and which questions have been manually graded, and have access to the provided feedback.

This manual grading process is a work in progress. There is currently ongoing work to provide more detailed and structured feedback through guided rubrics. Future changes are planned to also provide additional statistics related to manual grading results, as well as to improve the workflow for regrading requests.

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, you can submit them at https://github.com/PrairieLearn/PrairieLearn/discussions. These changes were a combined effort by multiple people, including Jonatan Schroeder, from York University, Maja Evans and Andrew Stec, from the University of British Columbia, and Seth Poulsen, from UIUC. Thanks also go to numerous instructors at several institutions for beta-testing earlier versions of this user interface and providing meaningful feedback.