I've seen that this has feature has been requested a number of times over the years, but I wanted to know if there has been any progress on implementing this as a feature.

I would like to be able to grade submissions in SpeedGrader without knowing anything about the student whose submission I am grading. While I can hide the students' names, this doesn't change the order in which they appear in SpeedGrader, so it can still be possible to know or guess whose work I'm grading, especially in smaller classes.

Currently, the only options are to sort by name, date of submission, or submission status. Sorting by name of course is not helpful, and sorting by submission status is essentially just sorting by name among those who submitted work, so it is similarly unhelpful. The one option that doesn't rely on sorting them alphabetically is to sort by date of submission, but this means that I'm aware that the first submissions I see are from students who submitted their work early, and the last ones I see will be those who submitted their work at the last minute, which introduces a different source of potential bias.

It seems like it would be relatively simple to add this functionality, and given the importance of avoiding bias in grading, it's kind of surprising that it hasn't already been implemented. Is this something that we can expect to be addressed in the near future?