Remark Requests

Opening remark requests

This page will explain how to open the remark requests form on the website for a new assignment.

1. Navigate to ~/web/content/assess/remark-requests/

2. Edit the const assessments in the index.md file to include the info of the assignment for which remarks are being released.
   Example from F20 a01:
   
   
   Note: It is equally valid to sort remark requests by category (correctness, handmarking, other) instead of by assignment question number. If you want to have remarks sorted by category, simply change the ‘questions’ array to look something like this
   

3. Follow the instructions on How to update the web site

Additional notes

• Currently, the remark requests page will automatically open and close according to the ‘start’ and ‘stop’ dates in the array.

  • In Fall 2020, there was an issue where the form would close early (prior to midnight) on the listed ‘stop’ date. (Probably worth looking into when setting up remark requests during a new term).

• For more on collecting/processing remark requests after the form has closed, see Remark Requests Script

How to Handle Remark Requests

Throughout the week, ISAs should place remark requests in the respective folder in the course email. When doing remakrs, go through the emails inside the folder containing all student remark requests one by one (note that there may be many emails wherein students mistakenly submitted a remark request for a rollback – see the late rollback/rollforward page on how to handle these). You can draft responses prior to the deadline in order to spread out the time spent on the remark requests, however, refrain from sending these emails before the deadline and changing any grades in order to ensure that all similar cases (including those that may appear later) are dealt with similarly.

When drafting a response to the student, always make sure you have checked their graded assignment on MarkUs, firstly, to confirm or refute their concern, and, secondly, to give the student valuable feedback. If you feel that the student’s request is valid and you would like to edit the grading, uncheck the checkbox that says “Released” to unrelease the mark. Make the necessary edits to the rubric and add an annotation starting with “Remark Request: ...” for feedback regardless of whether their marks change or not – you should only edit grades after the remark deadline has passed, and the email has been sent. Otherwise, if you did not change their mark, explain in your email why you did not do so. Remember that students are often stressed and concerned about marks, which factors into why a remark was submitted in the first place. Therefore, always be respectful and polite when responding to these requests.

If you are unsure about how to proceed with a remark, or if it concerns autotesting matters, make sure you check in with the other ISAs, and potentially, the instructors, to determine how to proceed.

Finally, note that students are free to submit a remark request for a bonus question, but we will not release any feedback regarding their request since we do not give any information regarding bonus questions.

As always, try your best to understand the student's perspective, and remember, you are communicating the students' concerns to the instructors, make sure the student understands that their concerns are valid and that the course staff cares about their wellbeing, education, and outlook on the course!

(OLD)

When assignment marks are released to students, there is typically a one-week period for remark request submission. To collect the remark requests, refer to this link.

Go through the spreadsheet of remark requests and look at the requests one by one. Always check the student’s markus for an error. If you feel that the student’s request is valid and you would like to edit the grading, uncheck the checkbox that says “Released” to unrelease the mark. Make the necessary edits to the rubric and add an annotation starting with “Remark Request: ...” for feedback regardless of whether their marks change or not. Even if you did not change their mark, explain why you did not do so. You may also send an email to the student with feedback if you feel that it is more appropriate. Set the marking status as complete, and re-release the mark to the student.

Remember that students are often stressed and concerned about marks, which factors into why a remark was submitted in the first place. Therefore, always be respectful and polite when responding to these requests.

Students are free to submit a remark request for a bonus question, but we will not release any feedback regarding their request since we do not give any information regarding bonus questions.

Generally, you should start remark requests after the submission deadline for students is past to remain consistent. Try to finish all remark requests within a week after the deadline.

After all remark requests for an assignment are complete, make a post to Piazza announcing that they are done, along with any common issues you would like to address regarding requests.

Sample Forum Post

A10 Remark Requests Complete

A10 remark requests are complete. You should see annotations on MarkUs starting with "Remark Request: ..." regarding your remark request.

A couple of notes:

1) If you submitted a remark request regarding the constant for A10 being worth 5%, we didn't make an annotation, since the marking scheme for that is not going to change.

2) Even if you got all your check test cases perfect, it doesn't guarantee that you will get all correctness marks for a question. When checking for your check test cases we don't run them, we just check if you're testing with the right inputs, so if there were issues with your code then it wouldn't catch them. Moreover, check test cases are written blind on our side since we don't know what your code will look like. So we can only check the most basic of cases which would make sense for everyone to have given what we expect the answers to look like. But correctness is much more thorough and is actually testing if the code you wrote is correct, so we test all sorts of common and obscure cases.

Remark Requests Script (remarkR.sh)

A script that collects the remark requests for an assignment and generates the corresponding CSV file including all the information needed to deal with the remark requests.

How to Use remarkR.sh

1. ssh userid@linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca Log in to your student account
2. ssh cs135@linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca Go to the course account
3. cd ~/remarkRequests Go to the directory the script is saved
4. ./remarkR.sh ASSIGN Run the script, ASSIGN is the assignment you want to collect the remark requests (e.g. a01)

Once the script finishes running, it will email the CSV file to the course account and you can start to deal with the remark requests for the assignment.

Note that remarkR.sh is a bash wrapper script around the Python script remarkR.py. The Python script does most of the work. The bash script handles the task of emailing the finished remark request CSV file to the course account. If you need to make changes to the script, edit remarkR.py in vim. The code is documented.

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