Educator's Voice

Vol 11, Issue 1
June 15, 2010
Why Are My Students Not Seeing Their Grades?

You spent the better part of last night and even the early morning pouring over student assignments or exams. At the end of this grading marathon, you entered your grades in the Gradebook, posted an announcement to the students that their efforts have been graded, and trundled off to bed with the satisfied feeling of a job done well and completed on time.

This morning you enter your course and email to find a disgruntled class wondering where their grades are! You go into your Gradebook and see grades. Your students go into their Gradebook and don’t see grades. What has gone wrong?

There are a few things that could be happening here:

1. Exams: In exams, the most common reason students can’t see their grade is due to a Gradebook Review Date set in the future. For an auto-graded exam, it is a best practice to set your Gradebook Review Date for the day following the last day the students can take the exam. If an exam contains questions that are not auto-graded, the Gradebook Review Date should be set for the day on which you intend to be finished with grading. If you set it for that day and then finish grading early, you could then reset the Gradebook Review Date so that the students can see their grade in the Gradebook. The Gradebook Review Date can be set via the Edit Schedule option in the toolbox for the exam content item, or by using the Course Scheduler (accessed through the Course Information & Preferences area of the Course Admin tab).
2. Exams: Specifically in an exam with auto-graded question types (like multiple choice, true-false, etc.), there could be a setting in the Toolbox which is unchecked. This setting is the “Automatically display objective score of a finished exam to students in the Gradebook” check box, and it is found under the Grading Options heading in the Toolbox of your exam item. This box is not checked by default on new exams, so you must remember to check this box. If this box is unchecked, the instructor must manually enter the exam results in the Gradebook. Note that this setting must be selected before students take the exam. If you check the box after students have taken the exam, it will not retroactively display the grades in the Gradebook, and you will still need to manually enter the exam grades in the Gradebook. So whenever creating a new exam (or at the beginning of each term when you receive your duplicated course shell), you should check the setting of this box to be sure it is correct.
3. Gradebook: You may have unchecked the “Return to student upon closing” box on a screen in the Gradebook. Boxes like this are accessible in several places in the Gradebook. One is the Gradebook Detail box, which is what you see when you click on the star (*) in the Gradebook to get to a student exam, discussion posting, or Dropbox submission, and is where you enter the student grade for any gradeable item. Other locations to check out are the screens that appear when you click on an exam, discussion, or Dropbox item title in the Gradebook (i.e., the column title for the column where student grades go). Depending on the type of content item, the box may say “Return” (for a Dropbox assignment) or “Share w/Student” (for a Doc Sharing, Journal or Webliography assignment, or an exam). In these locations, it is possible to inadvertently or purposefully uncheck the “Return” or “Share w/Student” boxes. For example, you might have unchecked some or all of them while grading to delay making the student grade visible at that time. You can easily re-check the boxes to make the grades visible to students.
4. Dropbox: In the Dropbox, you may have unchecked the “Return to student upon closing” box if you have opened a student’s Dropbox submission. This box is checked by default so that if you grade the submission and hit “Save & Close” or “Save & Next” then the assignment will be returned to the student. As mentioned above, you might have unchecked this box while grading to delay making the student grade visible at that time. You can easily re-check the box to make the grades visible to students. Alternatively, you could also check the “Return” box in the Dropbox Inbox area to return one or all graded Dropbox assignments to students.

We hope that these solutions can help prevent student and instructor frustration in the future.

Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D.
Director of Academic Training & Consulting

(This is a revised version of an article originally written for Educator’s Voice by Vicki Harsh, former Senior Academic Trainer & Consultant)

Instructor's Tip

Restricting Access to the Dropbox after a Deadline

Instructors using the Pearson LearningStudio system have requested the ability to block students from submitting late assignments to the Dropbox, and we are happy to announce that this is now possible!

A Dropbox basket is created and tied to a particular content item in the course navigation (using the item Toolbox). To block the submission of late assignments for that Dropbox:

1. Go to the Author mode for a content item with a Dropbox basket.
2. Click the Toolbox tab.
3. Click the “Edit Schedule” link.
4. Click the “Use the Following Dates” radial button.
5. Click the calendar icons to set start and end dates for the content item.
6. Place a check in the checkbox for “Restrict Access After” the end date.

Then, when a student opens the Dropbox tool and tries to access a Dropbox basket after the “end date” for the assignment submission they will see that the basket is “grayed out.”

If a student attempts to submit an assignment to a “grayed out” basket they will be prevented from submitting and will receive a message stating: “You do not have access to upload to the basket. Please select a new basket and click “Submit” to continue.”

Ken Switzer
Sr. Academic Trainer & Consultant