Blackboard Anonymous Grading

Contents

Overview

Instructors may hide student names from submitted assignments by enabling anonymous grading. Enabling anonymous grading during the creation of assignments allows for the elimination of grading bias.

Students are alerted to the anonymous grading setting on the Upload Assignment page. However, in the assignment instructions, instructors may wish to tell students not to include any information that would identify them like including their name in an attached file for the assignment.

Creating an Assignment with Anonymous Grading

Access a content area in your course.
Hover over the Assessments tab and select Assignment. Complete the required fields to create the assignment.
Scroll down the “Grading” section and select Grading Options.
Select the Enable Anonymous Grading check box and choose the condition for disabling anonymous grading from the drop-down menu.
1. On specific date: Provide the date you want to disable anonymous grading. Note: The system will begin to remove anonymity before the end of that date.
2. After all submissions are graded: This option requires that you set a due date for the assignment. After students submit attempts, the due date passes, and you have graded submitted attempts, anonymous grading will be disabled.

Disabling Anonymous Grading

Anonymous grading may be manually disabled at any time by unchecking the Enable Anonymous Grading check box.

Important: Anonymous grading may be turned on and off until the first student submits an assignment attempt. After the first submission, anonymous grading may only be turned off. For example, if half the assignment attempts were graded and anonymous grading was disabled, the remaining attempts with student names would not be tracked “Graded Anonymously”.

Accessing Anonymous Submissions

Assignment submissions set for anonymous grading may be accessed through the Grade Center or the Needs Grading page.

Accessing Submissions from the Grade Center

After the assignment due date has passed or all the attempts have been submitted, select the assignment column in the Grade Center to access submissions.

For assignments where anonymous grading has been enabled, the cells will be grayed out to obscure which students have made submissions.
Select the drop-down chevron next to the column name and select Grade Attempts.
The Grade Assignment page will appear where the submissions may be reviewed and graded as normal.

Accessing Submissions from the Needs Grading Page

Select Grade Center from the Course Management menu.
select Needs Grading.
In the User Attempt column, all identifying information is replaced with Anonymous Student and an attempt ID.
Select the drop-down chevron next to the assignment name. Select Grade All Users to begin grading.
The Grade Assignment page will appear where the submissions may be reviewed and graded as normal.

Student Experience

If an Assignment is set to be Anonymous, the student will be informed of this fact when submitting the assignment and will when reviewing his grade with My Grades and on the Review Submission History page.

On TIPS: Blackboard Anonymous Grading
On Blackboard corporate: Anonymous grading