Feature request: release grades to subset of students

[Tastarte]

My university mandates that students with pending academic misconduct cases (cheating) should not have their grades released until the AM case is resolved. We are supposed to mark as normal, however. Is there a way to do this? I can assign zero and keep a separate list, but it would be easier if I could mark everyone together. This also confuses matters when some students have received a grade of zero for another reason. Perhaps the groups feature could be used?

Good tool, btw! Not at an issue with autograder that I have so many academic misconduct cases...

[james-perretta]

@Tastarte Interesting question! It's definitely a tricky balance deciding what sorts of "gradebook-y" features to include.

I want to make sure I'm understanding your desired workflow correctly. While the case is pending, do you want the score to be hidden from students on the autograder or in some other gradebook software/spreadsheet? Would it be helpful if, similar to how you'd grant an extension on the autograder, you could mark a student/group as having a pending case?

[Tastarte]

@james-perretta thanks for the very prompt reply! Indeed, I want the score to be hidden from students on autograder since that is how students view their marks and feedback (the latter provided as comments/annotations during hand grading).

A similar mechanism for extensions would work well.

I take your points about gradebook-like features—it's also noteworthy that Canvas doesn't provide this functionality either, leaving the workaround to be removing the mark and saving it elsewhere. Both institutions I've worked at have had this "no marks while a case is pending" policy but if it's not sufficiently widespread it might not be worth your effort to implement.

[james-perretta]

@Tastarte Got it, thanks for clarifying! I'd be curious if some of my colleagues might find this sort of feature useful, keeping in mind that policies differ across institutions. @amirkamil, is this something you might find useful?

[amirkamil]

@james-perretta I can't think of a use case for this for us.

Would disabling submissions and then setting the due date for the affected students far in the future be an effective workaround? IIRC, the autograder does not release final grades to students until their extensions are over.

[james-perretta]

Sorry for the delay here--I had tried to reply on a bad internet connection, but it must not have gone through. @Tastarte does that sound like a reasonable workaround until we can figure out a more permanent solution? I don't think the implementation would be particularly complex, but I have a growing list of higher-priority items that I'd need to get to first...

[Tastarte]

Hi James,

It seems like it could work. We will try it for our late April submission coursework. The biggest problem I see is that it takes quite a few clicks per student to set an extension; and if the late April submission is like the late March one, we will have to do this for about 100 students. Doing an extension for one students at a time works fine when we have about 10 extensions per coursework, but having to do it 100 times will take hours!

[james-perretta]

@Tastarte Yikes! That does sound like a lot of work, and at that scale I'm not sure how much a dedicated checkbox would cut down on the time spent. What if as a stopgap I were to help you write a script to mark the extensions automatically from a list? What's your timeline on the April submissions? (Feel free to follow up via email, [email protected])