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Parallel Grading

About parallel grading

You can have specific users in your courses grade sets of assessment submissions. Graders can't see other graders' grades, feedback, annotations on student files, and rubrics. They grade in parallel and provide provisional grades. The default grading roles include instructors, graders, and teaching assistants.

The instructor role is the default final grader or reconciler. The reconciler reviews the provisional grades and determines the final grades that students see. You can assign the ability to reconcile grades to one or more other users with grading privileges and remove your ability to reconcile.

Some institutions refer to parallel grading as "blind grading."

Reconciler privileges

  • Reconcilers can view the graders' grades and feedback, but not their rubrics or annotations in student files.

  • Reconcilers determine final grades or reconcile them.

  • Reconcilers can override the final grade.

  • Reconcilers can post grades. If anonymous grading is enabled, reconcilers can reveal student names when grades are posted.

At this time, you can't enable parallel grading for group work. You also can't add questions to an assessment with parallel grading.

Why use parallel grading?

Grading and feedback from more than one grader promotes reliability, improves consistency, and removes bias. Reconcilers have more than one critique of the same sample of work as they determine each student's final assessment grade.

Fairness and impartiality in grading are often an institutional requirement or a concern. Parallel grading helps control bias among graders as much as possible.

For large classes, you can divide up the grading tasks among teaching assistants and other graders. For a merged course, you can assign each grader a class section.

Parallel grading workflow

Use these steps to enable and grade with parallel grading:

  1. Enable Parallel Grading

  2. Access and Grade Attempts

  3. Reconcile Grades

At the time of assessment creation, you can also enable anonymous grading so graders don't see students' identities. You can also enable the SafeAssign option to prevent plagiarism.

Parallel grading and course conversion

Delegated grading settings in Original courses aren't carried over when you convert your courses to the Ultra Course View.

Watch a video about parallel grading

The following narrated video provides a visual and auditory representation of some of the information included on this page. For a detailed description of what is portrayed in the video, open the video on Vimeo.