Assignments with different markers

[NickRiches]

I am trying to give advice to academic colleagues on various different marking scenarios. One is when they wish to share the marking load among a variety of different markers. One thing they tend to do is to allocate students to markers based on the Canvas placeholder IDs (e.g. "Student 1", "Student 2") but this backfires badly when they deanonymise because it is often not possible to work out who marked what unless the markers are really careful in their record-keeping.

The solution would be to allocate students to groups, and each marker pick a group, but I am a bit unsure how this would work. There are "assignment groups", but I think these are designed for multiple assignments with different students rather than a single assignment with allocation across markers. Then there are sections, but I am not sure these do the right thing.

So, what are best practices for assignments which need to be divided among multiple markers?

NB Canvas Sandbox environments are wonderful for exploring the ins and outs of Canvas, but they don't help you to explore the intricacies of marking. It should really be possible to create "zombie" students so you can explore the different marking scenarios, and see how they look from the students' perspective.

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

@NickRiches Welcome! If your markers/graders are going to be consistent across the whole course (so for example Student 1-10 goes with Marker A for the whole course) then sections will work.

The way that this will work is that you'll establish sections for the groupings of students, then assign your marker to only be able to manage/grade the section that they're assigned to.  You want to make sure that the marker is limited to interacting with the members of their own section.

Hope this helps!

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

@NickRiches Welcome! If your markers/graders are going to be consistent across the whole course (so for example Student 1-10 goes with Marker A for the whole course) then sections will work.

The way that this will work is that you'll establish sections for the groupings of students, then assign your marker to only be able to manage/grade the section that they're assigned to.  You want to make sure that the marker is limited to interacting with the members of their own section.

Hope this helps!

[NickRiches]

Thanks, that's useful to know. But I think that module leaders would just like to do this on an assignment by assignment basis.

[james_whalley · Accepted solution]

@NickRiches Unfortunately, there is not a clean way to do this for individual assignments in Canvas at this time. You could have multiple copies of each assignment and assign specific students to each copy, then only have a grader grade a specific copy. I wonder if the new Differentiation Tags would be useful for this?