Grading Workflow
Grading on-paper assignments is one of the main use-cases of this app. The app contains scripts that automate the handling of scanned PDF files with the students' work, other scripts that automatically identify the student corresponding to each submission based on their university id and it has a grading interface that allows one to grade the submissions digitally, and provide comments to the students. If you are using this app for a Canvas course, the app allows graders to upload all (or partial) grades and comments to a Canvas assignment.
The app expects the student submissions as a collection of PDF files. Each PDF file can contain dozens of submissions. A common choice is to scan each student section separately, i.e. create one PDF file of scanned submissions per section.
The scanning configuration options can be the default options on most modern scanners. The image resolution should be set to approximately 300 dpi. Less than that would lead to loss of clarity in the generated PDF. More than that would lead to unnecessarily large PDF files.
In order to use the scripts that automatically identify the students' university ID, the assignment should contain in (at least) one page a row of cells as the input field for the ID. Here is an example for the 8-digit university ID at the University of Florida:
You do not need to have exactly this layout. The cells for each digit of the ID simply need to be somewhere on the top left of the page. All cells should be of equal width and there should be no horizontal gap between the cells. Note that the algorithm that locates the handwritten digits tries to find the rectangle with the largest area near the top left of the page, so make sure your assignment does not contain a larger rectangle near the ID input field.
After you have scanned the students' work, launch the app, and navigate to the assignment that you want to grade. You will encounter a page that looks similar to this:
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First, set the grading scheme for the assignment. For example, in you have a quiz with 10 points total score, four questions, with maximum grades 4,1,4,1 (in that order), then set the following options and click
Update.
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Next, upload the submissions to the app. On the left form, click on (or drag-and-drop the PDFs to) the
Choose Filesbutton. You can add multiple PDFs at once. If the PDFs contain the submissions of more than one student, chooseMultiple studentsin the student selector. Finally, choose the number of pages of each submission, so that the PDFs are divided appropriately. E.g. if each scanned submission has two 2-sided sheets of paper, set the number of pages to4. Click upload and wait about 1 minute for the submissions to be processed.
After the PDFs have been processed you will be redirected to the assignment overview page that will look similar to this:
Next to the Identify button there is a counter of the number of submissions that are not associated to a student. No submissions are associated to students initially. Clicking the Identify button triggers a script that searches for IDs on page 1 of each submission. To change the target page(s), first click on the edit icon above the Identify button, select the pages to search and finally press the Identify button. Here is an example of how the page selection should look like if you want the app to search for university IDs on page 3:
After the image recognition script completes in about a minute, most submissions will be associated with a student:
It is common for some students to forget to fill in their ID, but the vast majority (>95%) of students who write their IDs will be identified automatically. You can identify the remaining submissions manually while grading (see the next section).
Now it's time to start grading. Note that all the actions in the app are happening "offline", i.e. grades and comments will not be automatically reflected on Canvas (we will address uploading grades and comments to Canvas in the last section of this article). In the assignment overview page, each submission appears as a card. Click on any of these cards to view the student's work and access the grading interface:
A few quality of life improvements have been implemented in this page:
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When you focus on the grade input field of a question you can force the PDF to scroll down to this question. To set this up, click on the gear icon at the bottom of the submission page, and set the scroll heights for all questions. For example, if question 1 appears near the beginning of page 3 and question 2 appears near the beginning of page 4, set the scroll heights to
2and3respectively (they can be decimals, too):
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All navigation can be done via the keyboard. To go from one question to the next, you can press Tab, and to go to the previous question you can press Shift+Tab. To go to previous/next submissions you can use the arrow keys ←/→, respectively. To update the grades you can simply press Enter. For example, if you have two questions, each worth 5 points, you can quickly give full points to the student and move to the next submission by pressing consecutively 5, Tab,5, Enter, →. You can submit a new text comment by pressing Ctrl+Enter while focused in the text area input field.
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Sometimes you might want to re-use a comment you have provided to one student. Instead of retyping it, or copying and pasting it, the grading interface allows you to
Stara comment and re-use it later:
After you finish grading all submissions, navigate back to the assignment overview page. Now, the grading progress counter should be 100%, and the counter of unidentified submissions should be zero (appears as ✓):
Next, click on the Sync Labeled Submissions from Canvas button, which retrieves information about each each submission in the assignment from Canvas. More specifically, the purpose of this button is to add a canvas_id property to each submission, which allows you to examine the correspondence between submissions in the app and submissions on Canvas. A Canvas icon will appear when you hover over the card of a synced submission in the assignment overview page.
A submission cannot be uploaded to Canvas unless it is (1) graded, (2) identified with a student, (3) synced with a Canvas submission. After completing all previous steps, the indicators for all these three aspects should have turned green:
You are now ready to upload grades and comments to Canvas. Click on the Upload to Canvas button. In the verification window that will appear, choose which submissions you want to upload and press Post. This will take a while (2-3 minutes), so make sure you have a stable internet connection. You can monitor the progress via the command line. After everything is uploaded to Canvas you can close the app.