Home > User Guides > VLE Guide for Instructors > Creating Assignments >  Administering Assignment Submissions

Administering Assignment Submissions

Submission Notifications

The platform allows the sending of a notification to the student when a student submits an assignment. This feature provides reassurance to the students that they have correctly submitted their assignments, especially when using features like draft submissions and file uploads. The platform also allows notifications to teachers either when students submit assignments, or when students submit assignments late, or both. This feature notifies you of the presence of assignments or provides a reminder to access assignments submitted after the due date.

 

Why is this useful?

  • Provides a receipt for student that the assignment has been successfully submitted
  • Provides notification that assignment is submitted
  • Notifies of any changes to submission – for student’s record and to notify you
  • Provides notification to student that assignment feedback is available
  • Note: When blind marking is used, students will receive a notification, but will not see feedback until all submissions are marked and reveal student identities is clicked. That releases rubric marks and inline comment feedback to all students.

 

When is it sent?

  • If ‘Require students to hit submit button’ is enabled within the assignment, which requires students to click a final submit button and prevents further changes, only one notification will be sent upon hitting the submit button.
  • If ‘Require students to hit submit button’ is not enabled, and students are allowed to make alterations or add/remove files from their submission, this receipt will be sent every time the file is altered – i.e. once on adding the file, once on adding a second file, once on removal of file, once on uploading a new file.

 

Where are these settings?

Submission Notification for Grader – Assignment > Edit Settings The grader is given two options:

  • Notify Graders about Submissions – YES/NO
  • Notify Graders about Late Submissions – YES/NO

 

The first option will notify the grader on any/all submissions made. The second will only send a notification for assignments submitted after the ‘Due Date’.

The Late Submissions option will be greyed out unless ‘Notify Graders about Submissions’ is selected as NO because ‘Notify Graders about Submissions’ will also send receipts for assignments submitted after the due date. To fully disable the grader receiving notifications, change both options to NO.

Viewing and grading submitted assignments

When students have submitted their assignments, they can be accessed by clicking on the assignment activity. This will bring up the Grading Summary page as shown below.

Assignment: Grading summary page

The Grading Summary page displays a summary of the assignment, including number of participants, number of drafts, number of submitted assignments, due date, and time remaining.

Clicking on the ‘View all submissions’ link will bring up the Grading Table as shown in below.

Assignment: Grading Table

The Grading Table contains columns of information about the student, the status of their submission, a link to grade their submission, a link to each submission and feedback comments and files (if enabled).

Clicking on the ‘Grade’ link will bring up the Grading window.

Assignment: Grading window

Filtering submissions

A dropdown menu accessed from the ‘Options’ section allows you to filter submissions so you can for example quickly see which students have not submitted yet.

Assignment: Filtering submissions

Submission status

If you will be assigning grades to student work, you may want to take note of the submission status before you begin the marking process. If you have required students click the Submit button, you may find that some submissions are still marked as Draft (not submitted), meaning the student has either uploaded a file(s) or entered some text, but has not clicked ‘Submit assignment’.


If it’s after the due date and you are about to commencing marking that you use ‘Prevent submission changes’ to stop students from making changes to their assignment. You can do this one by one by using the icon in the Edit column.

Or you can select two or more students by putting a tick in the select column and going to ‘Lock submissions’ from the “With selected” menu under the grading table.

Likewise, you can also revert a student’s submission to draft if they have uploaded the incorrect file. Instead of selecting ‘Prevent submission changes’ select ‘Revert the submission to draft’, or place ticks against selected students and choose ‘Revert the submission to draft status’ from the “With selected menu” under the grading table.

Quick grading

Under Options you can determine your preferences for the number of assignments you wish to display per page. You can also filter assignments either to show all (no filter), submitted, or requires grading. This is also where you can turn on quick grading.

Quick grading allows you to enter grades and a feedback comment (if enabled in Assignment settings) directly into the grading table.

  1. You can enter grades and feedback comments using quick grading. It is now possible to enter grades in decimal format. You will not be able to return a feedback file to your students (if enabled in the Assignment settings).
  2. Enter the grades.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the grading table and click ‘Save all quick grading changes’.
  4. A confirmation screen will appear.

Student grading page

If you have enabled File Feedback in the Assignment settings and wish to upload either the marked student assignment, a completed text based feedback document or audio feedback, click on the green tick in the Grade column (or use the icon in the Edit column and select Grade).

Here you can enter grades, feedback comments and feedback files (if enabled in the Assignment settings). You can use drag and drop to upload feedback files.

Controlling when to notify students of graded work

A checkbox is available when grading individual students. Choose Yes to notify them immediately or No to grade without notifying the student.

Interpreting mLaP results

If you have enabled the mLaP setting, the Grading Table will look like the image below. Under the File submissions column, percentages of similarities will be seen. Note that mLap only processes txt, pdf, doc, docx, odt, rtf, txt, cpp, java files.

Assignment: Grading Table with enabled mLaP

Click the eye icon to view the similarity scores. It will redirect you to a page with a list of all of the similar documents found from the Internet and from other submitted assignments. You can also see each item in detail by clicking the eye  icon beside the similarity score. The readability scores and the word count are also displayed.

Assignment: mLaP simiarity scores
Assignment: mLaP results

PDF Annotation

From the Grading Table, click the Grade button. The Grading window will appear as shown in the image below. You can add comments, draw, highlight, etc. on the submitted PDF file. Click Save changes or Save and show next to apply your changes.

Assignment: Grading window

Note: You can add a PDF Annotation activity. Follow the steps from Activities and Resources: Add an Activity or Resource. This enables collaborative markup on PDF Documents. The users are able to annotate specific parts of an PDF and discuss them with other users.