Persistent anonymous grading

[cjustin]

One of our schools uses an external system for exams where students are anonymous to faculty members. They enter their grade for the exam and never see the student's name or ID.

We would like the students to be able to take exams with anonymous grading in Canvas courses instead of this external system. However, it seems like it is not possible to combine anonymous and non-anonymous assignments within the same course because grades have to be posted for their final grade to be computed. 

Is there a workaround for this? It seems like it is logically not possible because you need to post the grades in order to see how they factor into the total grade, and even then, you could potentially calculate which student was which by looking at how their total grade changed. Is my understanding correct?

[ColtonSwapp · Accepted solution]

Hello @cjustin 

I think I understand you correctly. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here...

You do have the ability to hide the students names when you go to Speedgrader to grade the students submissions. This will hide their names when you pull up the submissions in Speedgrader and allow the graders to anonymously grade without seeing the students name. Instead of seeing the students names, they will see Student 1, Student 2, Student 3, Etc. This can be done for separate quizzes and assignments in the course just by setting up the anonymous setting from Speedgrader. 

One issue with that is that it does not hide in the gradebook. You are correct in that. they would be able to look at the gradebook and see the score for each student. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton

[cjustin]

Thank you, Colton, that is my understanding as well. We determined that this feature doesn't do quite what we needed it to do, but it's useful to confirm.