Inspera Grading Committees
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Inspera Digital Exams have the option to grade using a committee to divide the student's submission between academic colleagues.
This enables graders to only assess and grade a specific set of student submissions.
The use of a grading committee in Inspera is useful for large-scale assessments, where a single marker is not evaluating all student submissions.
Benefits of Grading Committees:
- You can assign specific graders to specific student submissions using Grading Committees.
- You can create multiple committees and have multiple markers within the same committee.
- You can choose the number of candidates in each committee.
- If multiple colleagues are marking within Inspera, this option helps divide the marking up by student submission within the Inspera system itself.
Please note it is not possible to divide submissions for Markers to grade certain sections/questions of the exam. The Digital Exams Team recommend this is communicated to your Grading team.
How do I set up a grading committee?
Grading committees can be created before or after the exam has taken place. The exam set-up must be completed on Canvas/Inspera before grading begins.
To create a grading committee:
- Access the exam from the Canvas assignment (you’ll need Teacher or Teaching assistant access on the Canvas Module).
- Open the assignment and click the grey load button to access Inspera.
- From the Deliver tab (or landing page) of the exam, scroll down to Committees and click on the orange ‘manage’ button.
- Click 'Add committee'.
- Give your first committee a name, often is the name of the academic who will be added to the committee, click Add.
- Repeat this process for the number of committees that you require.
Note: It is not recommended that you use the word 'committee' within the name of your committee, to avoid a repetition of the word in the grade tool.
To add graders to a committee:
- Within the Committees test setup, select a committee and click ‘edit graders’, which will display at the bottom of the screen.
- Select the grader(s) to add to the committee.
- Click Finish.
Note: Only markers that are added as contributors to the exam will be displayed. If someone is not appearing for you who you need to add as a grader, ensure that they go to the Canvas Assignment area and click the grey load button to access the Inspera exam and automatically gain their Grader/marker access.
To add students to a committee:
- In the Deliver tab, scroll to the candidates area and click ‘View all'. This displays a list of all students who are enrolled on the course in Canvas. Inspera only lists the students number and not the student's name.
- Multiple candidates can be added to a committee at one time using the tick boxes to select them. You then select 'Edit grading committee' which appears at the bottom of the window.
Once all submissions have been graded by each committee, t will need to be completed. It is important to check your contributors list and remove ‘grader’ access from colleagues who do not need to mark the exam, through the manage contributors option. If there are non-markers added as graders, Inspera will not allow confirmation of marks.
To remove the Grader permission from a contributor:
- Find the contributor list at the top right of the exam's Deliver area.
- Click 'Manage'.
- A list of all the test contributors will be displayed, showing which permissions each person has. For anyone listed who isn’t marking, click the cog icon next to a contributor and click the X icon next to the Grader permission.
Video demonstration of Grading Committees set up
LTDS have created a video demo that illustrates setting up a Grading Committee for a manually marked Inspera exam.
Can I check that all students are assigned to a committee?
Yes. In the candidates area click the columns icon (top right corner) and then from the drop-down tick ‘committees’.
The candidate list will now display student IDs, exam information such as progress, submission save time and on the far-right hand side, the committee information will now be visible. This will list all the committees set up for this exam. You can see which students are assigned to which Grading Committee.
If you’d like to retrieve this information from Inspera, you can export as CSV. To do this, above the committee column, use the drop down and select ‘download as CSV'.
Can Markers see all student submissions when using a Grading Committee?
As Grading Committees are used to share marking between a group of Graders, each Marker can view and mark the work of only the students in their committee. Markers would only have access to grade the student submission they have been assigned to mark.
If a marker needs to be added to another committee, go into the created committee and add another grader by selecting ‘edit graders’.
Can a Grading Committee be used for Moderation?
If you are using Grading Committees for moderation, you can assign the moderator to the Grading Committee(s) that they need to access.
Note: moderators must be added as a ‘contributor’ to the exam. If they do not appear when trying to assign them to the Grading Committee, please ask them go to the Canvas Assignment area and click the grey load button to access the Inspera exam. This will allow them to automatically gain access. After this, you can add them to any committee as required.
Can I delete a Grading Committee?
You can delete a committee before marking is confirmed, but this cannot be undone. To do this, select the committee that you wish to delete and then click ‘delete committee’ which appears at the bottom of the window. Grading Committees can be edited and renamed before any marking is confirmed. If marking is confirmed the deletion option will not be available.
Note: If marking is in progress and a committee is deleted, marks assigned by markers should not be removed and will be viewable to all markers, if the exam set up is using ‘shared marking’ (this is the default). We recommend contacting digital.exams@ncl.ac.uk if you need to fully delete a Grading Committee.
Note: Deleting a grading committee will not remove the graders from within the committee as contributors on the exam. It will also not delete any candidates assigned to that committee from the exam.