Assignment Results (Sync Mode Courses)

This article is about understanding and accessing results for Peerceptiv assignments in a Sync Mode course. 

In Sync Mode courses, results are generated for an assignment when the final deadline ends. If you have selected to hold grades for manual release, students will be able to view the grades after you release them. We recommend also reading the student article, Understanding Peerceptiv Results: Sync Mode Assignments and posting it for your students to read or watch the accompanying video about results.

This article will cover:

How to View and Release Results

How to Understand Peer Assessment Grades

How to Override Grades

How to Adjust Grading Settings

How to View and Release Results

Click the results tab on the left side navigation bar. 

Overview Tab

The overview tab offers a number of results-related controls. It lets you know whether or not results have been released and are visible to students. You should only click to Release Results when you have reviewed the results and are done making all grade adjustments (overrides, changing the curve, etc.). Releasing results will both release them to students and will send the grades to the LMS gradebook. Please note that students will NOT be able to see any reviews or ratings on their submission until the results are released.

Clicking the Advanced Visibility Settings button will give you the ability to make only certain portions of the results visible to students. You can choose to show or hide specific features of the student results page, including rating results, comment results, and grade results. 

There are many scenarios in which an instructor may choose to hide some portion of the results from students but two of the most common scenarios include: 

• Some instructors want students to participate in peer assessment assignments in which students give and receive comments, but do not want grades to be visible to students. They may choose to hide grades results. 
• Some instructors want students to participate in team member (peer) evaluation assignments but do not want students to see the comments their group members made about them. They may choose to hide the comment results.

Please be aware that hiding grades from students in the advanced visibility settings does not prevent grades from being sent to the LMS gradebook. If you wish to hide the grades in your LMS gradebook as well, then you will need to make those columns hidden in your gradebook. 

The Recalculate Grades button in the Controls should be used after you make any overrides or grading adjustments to ensure that those changes have been correctly applied. If the assignment has ended and you make any changes, including adding reviews or overriding grades, you need to click 'recalculate grades' in order to apply those changes. This button will also resend the grades to your LMS gradebook. 

Export Results creates a spreadsheet download of all student results and reviews. The first sheet, Assignment Results, has the grades information for the assignment. The second sheet, Reviews, contains the ratings and comments made by each reviewer. This sheet allows you to view all comments at a glance for this assignment. If the assignment has multiple components (peer assessment and team member evaluation, for example), there will be a Review sheet for each assignment component.

Export Submissions allows you to download a zip file of all file submissions for that assignment. URL or text submissions are not included in this download. You can only export submissions after results have been generated. 

Submission Scores Tab

The Average Rating Scores card displays the class average score on each rating prompt. Scroll within the card to view the class’s average score for each rating prompt. Each bar graph will be colored green (average of 80% or above), yellow (average of 60% to 79%), or red (average below 60%). 

If you scroll down on this page, the “Individual Scores” card displays each individual student’s average score for each rating prompt. Additionally, if you have used the “Tag” feature, you will be able to see an average score for each tag that you set up. For instance, if you created a tag that included 3 different rating prompts, you would see the collective average for all three of those prompts when you view that tag. 

Grades Breakdown Tab

The “Grades Breakdown” card displays a bar graph of how many students received grades at each percentage level. This chart shows the overall grades for the assignment.

Below the graph, the “Individual Assignment Grades” card displays the overall grade of each student (this is the percentage grade that is sent back to an LMS grade book, if you are using an LMS), as well as how the student scored on each category within that overall grade: the submission grade, review grade, and task grade.

Late Submissions

Use the Individual Assignment Grades table to identify late submissions and waive late penalties, if appropriate. After the assignment is over, you can click the Late Submissions button to see only the students who submitted late.

If you click on a student's name, you will be taken to their details page and can click Waive Late Penalty to remove the late penalty. If late submissions were not allowed or the penalty was set at 0, there will not be an option to waive late penalties.

How to Understand Peer Assessment Grades

There are three components that make up the Overall Grade on a Peer Assessment assignment. 

1. Submission Grade: This grade reflects the quality of the submission and is based on the peer (and/or instructor) ratings. Peerceptiv adjusts these ratings based on the accuracy score of the reviewer. After the average rating score is adjusted for accuracy, it is then placed on a relative curve according to the set mean and standard deviation (curved grading style), or according to instructor benchmarking (benchmarked grading style). In summary, the submission grade is based on the average rating scores received, but is adjusted according to reviewer accuracy and overall class performance to produce a finely calibrated grade that is both fair and valid.  

2. Reviewing Grade: The Reviewing Grade reflects the quality of the student’s reviewing behavior. It is made up of two components: Accuracy and Helpfulness. Accuracy measures how accurately a student assigns ratings according to the rubric. Helpfulness is calculated based on the feedback ratings the student receives from their peers.

The accuracy and helpfulness scores are each placed along a curve with a mean of 90 and a standard deviation of 10. These scores are then averaged together for the review grade, with each component weighted equally. The student results displays the accuracy and helpfulness grades separately. If there is no feedback stage, the review grade consists entirely of the rating accuracy component. If there are no rating prompts, the review grade consists entirely of the feedback ratings the student receives from their peers. The review component weightings and curve cannot be edited.

3. Task Grade: The Task Grade is a simple measure of whether the student did all the required tasks in the assignment. If they completed all the tasks, they will receive 100% of the task grade.

These three grades are combined to produce the Overall Grade according to the weight that the instructor has designated in the settings. The default weights are that the Submission Grade counts as 40 percent of the Overall Grade, the Reviewing Grade counts as 40 percent of the Overall Grade, and the Task Grade counts as 20 percent of the Overall Grade. These weights can be edited in the assignment settings at any time. 

How to Override Grades

Click on an individual student’s name in the “Individual Assignment Grades” card and then click “Override” to override their grade. 

After you have made changes to individual student grades through grade overrides, or made changes to the grading settings (for example, by adjusting the mean and standard deviation), you should always click the “Recalculate Grades” button in the overview controls menu to save your changes and recalculate grades for the assignment. Please note that you cannot set a component grade to be above 100%. If your assignment is connected to an LMS, no grades above 100% can be sent to the LMS, so the grades are capped at 100% here.

How to Adjust Grading Settings

You are able to adjust the grading settings after the assignment results have been generated. Simply click to edit settings (the settings gear icon on the dashboard) and click to the grading section. It is best to do this before you have released grades to students and it is important that you recalculate the grades after adjusting any grading settings.

Adjust the Mean and Standard Deviation

Adjusting the mean and/or standard deviation is most effective when everyone’s submission grades and/or reviewing grades seem higher or lower than you expected.

If you choose Curved Grading as your grading style, then you are able to adjust the Mean and Standard Deviation to affect your class’s grades as a whole. This will affect the curve that is applied to the Submission Grade. If you chose Benchmark Grading as your grading style, then adjusting the mean and standard deviation has no effect.

The mean is the average grade that your students will receive and the standard deviation sets the variability along the curve. Most students will fall within the range of plus or minus one standard deviation. With the default setting of a mean of 85% and a standard deviation of 10, most students will have a submission grade that falls between 75% and 95%. If this range doesn’t seem reasonable for your class, you can make the mean higher. Moving the mean up to 90% will increase the overall percentages in the class to be more in the range of 80%-100%. Adjusting the Standard Deviation would affect the overall range as well. If you have a mean of 90% and then change the standard deviation to 5, the range would fall between 85%-95%. 

Adjust the Weights

Adjusting the Weights is most effective when you feel that students should get more (or less) credit for their submission, reviewing quality, or task completion.

Adjusting the weights will put more or less emphasis on any of the three components of the Overall Grade. These components are the Submission Grade, Review Grade, and Task Grade. If you want the overall grade to be more impacted by one of these three components, then you can increase the weight of that component and decrease the weight of the others. 

If your rubric does not have rating prompts, or if you have only required one review per person, submission and review grades will not be valid. In these cases (or in other cases where you only want a task-based completion grade), you should but 100% of the grading weight on the task grade. 

Remember to recalculate the grades after adjusting any grading settings to apply the new changes.