CS100 Home

Marking Assignments

This page assumes the use of Desire to Learn and is current as of April 2012.

After a while, you will probably feel like the majority of your work involves marking (though to put into perspective, it is probably less than half). This is certainly one of our biggest tasks as far as students are concerned. With that said, there are many things to consider when dealing with marking assignments (other than the marking itself). We want to ensure that everything we are working with remains accurate, consistent and minimize any potential issues that students may have.

Creating a Marking Scheme

The tutors usually make the marking schemes for the assignments and go over them with the other tutors, the instructor and the IA’s at the marking meeting. You can use the past marking schemes for past assignments available to you on the course account in jcbserver for a template (ask your ISC if you cannot find it). Before you begin the marking scheme ask the instructor if they have any feedback about how the questions should be marked. Before the marking meeting, you should be looking at some students’ answers to make sure your marking scheme is fair and has no obvious mistakes. If any changes to the assignment were made that will affect the accuracy of the marking scheme, be sure make the necessary adjustments.

Consult your fellow tutors, your ISC, or the instructor if you are unsure of something. If there is a change you would like to make to the marking scheme that seems debatable, make a note of it and bring it up at the marking meeting. It is better to discuss it and have the entire marking team on board with your suggestion than to assume you are correct. Again, you should not make changes without a consensus.

Print out a copy of the marking scheme for each tutor and IA to bring to your marking meeting (make an effort to reduce paper usage). Remember, when you post the solutions to the assignments on Learn, do not post the marking scheme.

Doing the Marking

Downloading the Assignments

Students will be submitting their assignments through Learn. There are a couple different ways you can view their submissions. The first, more time-consuming method requires you to click on each individual student’s link, and then their download link. Fortunately, Learn allows you to download an entire drop box’s contents at once.

To do so, you will need to access the “Dropbox” tab on Learn. Select the assignment you wish to grade. You will be confronted with a page, which gives you a number of ways to sort the submissions on top, followed by the submissions sorted by user. The top of the page will appear as follows by default:

Change the first drop down menu that reads “View By” from User to Groups, and click apply. “Groups” will appear next to the option you changed. Select your group and click apply again. This will show you only your group of students. You can sort your group by last name or first name by clicking them at the top of the table.

Also at the top of the page is the number displayed per page. Change that number to 200, or any other number larger than your group of students. This will allow you to select all of your students at once. Now click the check box, at the top left corner of the table. This will select all students submissions displayed on the page. The final page should appear as follows:

Marking the Assignments

Part A will be auto-graded. In the event of an error in the autograding, tutors must go through the question with the problem and regrade it manually. This means checking each response, and granting students with the correct response a mark by changing the grade from 0 to 1.

Part B must be manually graded.