Yacapaca

We have significantly improved the way that marking works – particularly for essays and portfolio assignments. After you mark an assignment, it will by default stay open for the student to have another go. Just above the ‘save’ button on the markscreen, there is a new dropdown called “Prevent further changes by student?”. This allows you lock the work. Note that the work will also stay locked unless you add either a mark or a comment, as the system will think the assignment is still waiting to be marked.

What the student sees is also different:

1. The Summary view is permanently available. It shows the free-text content of each assignment, together with the teacher’s most recent comments in red. These disappear when the student resubmits the work. Multiple-choice answers have been removed from the Summary window, so with pure multiple-choice assignments the window is intentionally blank. The Summary screen now gives students a useful place to copy work out to a word processor, if this is how you like them to work.
2. When a portfolio assignment comes back from marking and has been left unlocked, the assignment can be viewed and altered. Free text will look exactly as it did before the work was submitted and can be edited. To see your comments, the student should open the Summary window.
3. When a multiple-choice assignment comes back from marking and has been left unlocked, it too can be edited. Students can still see the feedback from their previous attempts, but the maximum permitted number of tries has been restored to each question. This obviously makes it much easier to get a high mark, something that should be born in mind when assessing the student! My understanding from teachers I’ve talked to about this is that in general you will prefer to lock pure multiple-choice assignments after the first attempt.

You can iterate around the mark->edit->mark loop as many times as you like.

Other changes

Along with this update come a round dozen performance enhancements and bug fixes. You are unlikely to notice any of these because, like the man who picks banana skins off pavements, their sole function is to prevent problems that could otherwise be very noticeable indeed as overall usage of the system continues to climb.