What are the Best Methods for Grading and Feedback
(and ways to make it easier)?

man writing with a laptop — Provide prompt and quality feedback

Grading and feedback on discussions and other assignments is one of the most important areas where you actively teach. As has already been mentioned, timely grading is extremely important to your online students as they have no other way to judge if they are grasping the course concepts and/or fulfilling the requirements of an assignment.

One of the biggest complaints from online students is that their instructors don't provide quality feedback on their assignments and that they have poor turnaround time for grades. Don't let this be you!

How Often Should I Grade?

In a typical 16 week course, you should try to have short assignments such as discussions graded in 3-5 days. Medium-length and longer assignments such as unit reflection papers may take longer perhaps 5-9 days. This not only ensures students have feedback on one assignment before the next is due, it also shows your students you are engaged and care about their success.

How Often Should I Grade?
Semester	Turnaround Time for Grades
	Short Assignment	Medium to Long
16 Week Semester	3-5 Days	5-9 Days
8 Week Semester	2-3 Days	3-5 Days
4 Week Semester	1-2 Days	2-4 Days

What are Some Tips for Grading (and ways to make it easier)?

Speedgrader Annotations including highlight, draw, and text annotations; strikeout text; and comments — Use SpeedGrader to provide annotated feedback in a Submission Assignment

Use SpeedGrader
SpeedGrader makes it quicker and easier to evaluate student assessments:

Submission Assignments: Markup and annotate student papers
Discussions: View all of one student's submissions in one place (including their original posts and all replies)
Quizzes: Go through each student's quiz for review

Please view the Canvas guides on SpeedGrader to learn about how to access and use it.

Grade Posting Policy (formerly "Mute" Grades)
Use a Grade Posting Policy to hide grades while you are grading an assignment in order to release all scores and feedback at once.

Hide/Post policy for an ASSIGNMENT: How do I hide grades for an assignment?
Hide/Post for policy the COURSE: How do I select a grade posting policy for a course in the Gradebook?
How do I hide/post grades from SpeedGrader?

Use "Message Students Who"
Use this tool to message a specific segment of students (those who have scored poorly or scored well, those who haven’t submitted an assignment, etc.).

How do I use Message Students Who?

Always Include Zeroes
Use zeroes ("0") in the gradebook when students don’t turn something in or it won’t count against them. Canvas can enter zeroes for an assignment for you if you set a default grade after you have finished grading.

How do I Set a Default Grade for an Assignment?

What about Plagiarism?

For all writing assignments, you have the option to utilize Turnitin to check for plagiarism. This can be turned on under the settings for an assignment.

Creating a Canvas Assignment with Turnitin

How do I Set Up my Gradebook?

In Step 6 of Creating a Course we discuss setting up the gradebook (please see this page for a more thorough explanation). Most of your gradebook items will be set up automatically when you create graded assignments within Canvas. You can also add assignment groups, weight your gradebook, and set rules for dropping specific grades. For more information view the guides below.

>> The next section will discuss how to evaluate and improve your course as you teach it.

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