Michael Sawyer, Senior Project Manager at the University of London, discusses the development and benefits of new grading workflows in Inspera with host Ishan Kolhatkar from Inspera. The University of London delivers around 100,000 exams annually on Inspera and has been worked closely with us to develop this new capability. 

If you put 20 academics in a room and ask them to design the perfect grading policy, you’ll leave the room with at least 26 different, but equally robust, policies. Grading or marking (I’ll stick to grading to be consistent in this blog post) is both an art and a science. The art is in academic judgement being applied to a rubric or mark scheme, leading to rich, meaningful feedback. The science bit is less fun. This usually involves a battle with complex spreadsheets that contain numerous formulas and either judicious locking of cells, or an administrator crossing their fingers that colour coding will prevent people from deleting formulas. Or you might be a little luckier. The platform you use might have exactly the same grading workflow that you use. 

But why leave it to chance? Or have to abandon digital grading halfway through the process because you can’t bend a platform to the way you want to grade. Or worse still, be forced to not grade in a platform at all because it doesn’t meet your quality assurance needs. 

This is why we see the future differently. We recognise that within an institution, school, department or level, or indeed assessment type, different workflows are essential. Which is why we are introducing a new capability in Inspera Assessment: Grading Workflows. In doing so, we’re introducing Customer Architectured Workflows to meet your quality assurance needs. Not Product Defined Workflows that fall short. This unique approach to grading workflows means you define as many templates as you want and then deploy them to the appropriate assessment. For each marking phase, you define:

  1. How submissions are allocated to graders
  2. What sort of marking takes place, including approve/not approved for external examiners
  3. Where there are multiple graders in a phase, how you want to resolve conflicts
  4. What rules you want to apply either to move a submission to a subsequent phase or to deem it graded

Submissions don’t need to follow a linear path. After first marking if your policy states that a certain tolerance is permitted between graders and resolved mathematically, but greater than the tolerance requires another grader, you can build that workflow. If you want all of that with a safety net of a third grader for papers that receive a fail, you can add that phase. What about if you decide that halfway through the workflow, your original rules have generated too few or too many submissions for a particular phase? Well, you can amend the workflow on the fly. 

But that’s not all. Alongside flexible grading workflows, we are introducing a new grading dashboard to show real time progress of the grading process. If you were ever on one of my grading teams, you’ll have had a phone call or email from me early in the morning asking for an update on where you were up to today in the seemingly unremitting mass of submissions. Now, this will be visible to administrators.

Finally, there will be a full audit trail for quality assurance purposes so that you can revisit how a submission progressed from submitted to graded. 

If you’ve ever administered an assessment, all of this will be familiar to you. Yours is an important and time pressured role. As is that of a grader. Grading workflows are here to make everyone’s life easier so that they can concentrate on the skill of grading, providing rich feedback and accurate, quality assured results. 

This is not a static release. We have plans to add further enhancements to grading workflows, all with the same aim, to let you grade your way, with your processes, visible and visual granular data and an audit trail. For our existing Inspera Assessment community, early access is scheduled to begin in April with general availability to follow. Whether you are an existing user or want to find out how you can flexibly assess with academic integrity, taking advantage of grading workflows, get in touch and we’ll be happy to show you how you can make your workflows a seamless part of an Inspera Assessment.

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Hear more about Grading Workflows from our Product Manager, Simon Martin