Through parallel grading, we allow more than one user to grade a certain activity or assignment, so we can better manage and grade students' work more impartially. In the end, one of the graders will be responsible for reconciling the received grades.

The course roles of users who can grade are instructor, teaching assistant, and grader. Any user within the course who has one of these roles can be used as a grader, assigning provisional grades to students' assignments. The grading process for these graders is the same as for the instructor.

Setting Up Parallel Grading

Parallel grading is enabled for each activity by checking the box for Two graders per student in the activity settings. Once the box is checked, we will access Assign graders to select who will grade the students and who will reconcile the grades later.

Grading and Reconciling Grades

When we access grading, depending on the chosen configuration, we will see the provisional grades from others (if someone has already graded before us). We will grade normally.

Once we have added our evaluation of the work, the Needs reconciliation icon will appear, which will remain visible until an instructor assigned as a reconciler reconciles the grades. The reconciler users, in turn, will start receiving notifications about these reconciliations and can initiate the process from the activity, the gradebook, or the Activity Stream.

The reconciler can then review the activities that have already been graded. By clicking Reconcile all, they can reconcile all pending activities following a grading criterion: Highest, average, and lowest, calculated from the grades assigned by the delegated graders.

If we prefer to reconcile one by one, we can click on the specific user and review the graders' scores and comments, and reconcile.

On the reconciliation screen, you can see the graders' progress for the specific activity (how many attempts assigned have been graded, average grade) and the list of graded students with the provisional grades assigned by each evaluator. Next to each grade, an icon will appear if that evaluator has left comments for the student.

We can view each grader's comments by clicking on the comments icon.