Good morning,
How do you tackle your grading in Canvas? Some folks grade assignments as they are submitted. Others wait for everything to be turned in, then do a marathon grading session.
If you’re a marathoner, it’s likely that you grade in SpeedGrader’s default order, which is alphabetical by last name. Did you know, however, that a recent study suggests the possibility of folks with last names sorted later in the alphabet seeing slightly lower grades overall?
I got the idea for this newsletter when I learned of a new feature in SpeedGrader, that of changing how students are sorted on the default list. Little did I know that The Hechinger Report would beat me to the punch in sharing the benefits of using it! Essentially, if it’s possible that students could receive poorer grading when listed alphabetically, then why not use the new SpeedGrader name randomizer to combat that bias?
Here's how the new feature works. Go into SpeedGrader and look for the gear icon to the left of your screen:
Click it, then click “Options.” If you click the drop-down menu beside “Sort student list,” you’ll see the following options:
One of the options is “randomize students.” If you select that, instead of your students’ names being in alphabetical order, they’ll be in a random order.
I’ve been using this feature and have found it very helpful. Not only does it ensure that folks later in the alphabet aren’t getting me at my most tired, but I’ve also found that I don’t use the last name as a metric for how much grading I have left. (“Oh, I’m in the Ws! Almost there!”) The only challenge has been finding a student on the list if I want to regrade them later. In that instance, I ended up sorting again by name once I was through my initial pass.
If you want to ensure that you grade in the order that students submitted their work, you can sort by that as well—and randomize within those results. Even if you’d prefer not to randomize the student order, check out the options for sorting, as they suit many grading styles.
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