1. Assignments, Assessment, Grading, and Cheating
Hi, and Welcome to Assignments, Assessment, Grading, and Cheating. We’re going to move quickly, and at a fairly high level, but I want you to know that everything we’re going to talk about is something that can be a larger conversation with Instructional Design and Access if you would like some support in this area.
John Jones
Director, Media Resources Center

2. We’re doing how much? (Agenda)
Introduction
Assignments
Assessment & Grading
Cheating
Questions
So, in case the title of the presentation wasn’t enough of an agenda,

3. Introduction The Importance of Blackboard Collection resources
Communicate with students
Assess student work
Grading
Lets talk for a moment, by way of introduction, about blackboard. Blackboard is going to be an important tool in a lot of the things that I’ll be talking about today. It can be a big help in managing your class, gathering resources together in one place, communicating with your students, assessing their work, and facilitating and communicating grade information to your students.

4. Assignments
Okay, so let’s start off talking about assignments

5. The Importance of Clear Objectives
Course Objectives – what will students be able to do as a result of having taken this course
Unit Objectives – what will students be able to do as a result of completing this unit?
Objectives are now a required part of your course syllabus, and are reviewed by your department chair
In some cases, they may already be designed for you
Before we get into talking about assignments, though, we should talk about objectives. If you’re working with a class that has been designed already, or one that is an integral part of a program already, those objectives may already be defined for you. If not, you’ll need to write them and include them in your course syllabus – both course and unit objectives. There’s a lot of support online for writing objectives, and I’ll include some links in the resources page for the conference.
Some disciplines may already be well used to explicitly defined objectives. Others have always had implied ones and have not felt the need to explain the need for them, but creating explicit objectives is useful as we start to evaluate alternative assignments and activities for the class.

6. Interaction Modes Student to content Student to instructor
Student to student
Student to community or workplace
So, classically we have always talked about three types of interaction in course design. Students interact with the content of the course, as they read books, watch videos, complete assignments, and so on. They interact with the instructors when they turn in assignments, get grades, and during lectures. And students interact with other students in classroom discussion, group work, peer assessment, and so on.
With our focus on applied learning at WSU, we can consider a fourth interaction mode (click), student to community or workplace. We have taken on the institutional goal of making sure that where possible our students don’t only experience a fairly detached, sterile classroom environment full of theory, but they also have opportunities over the course of their time at WSU to learn by doing in the community and workplace.

7. Applied Learning
Can you design an Applied Learning assignment for your class?
Service Learning and volunteerism (a type of applied learning)
Mentorships
Research within the academic area
Consider the type of work done by people who work in your field
Is there a way to give students concrete experience producing that sort of work?
Can you connect them with a real-world business that might use their project?
Bring the experience back to the course objectives
Depending upon the subject matter, some classes will find it easier to design quote-unquote real world applied learning exercises as a part of the class. But we encourage you to spend a little time thinking outside the box about what exercises you might come up with that would support the objectives of the course.
In many cases, there won’t be examples, but if you can add these features to your classes, it will go a long way towards making your class memorable, effective, and also make it difficult to cheat, which we’ll be getting to talking about in a few minutes.

8. Service Learning What is service learning?
“a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” 
-National Service Learning Clearinghouse
Can you design assignments for your class that involve volunteering or engaging with a community issue as a part of the project – we have models and examples across many disciplines.
A specific sort of Applied Learning that has a strong presence across many disciplines at WSU is service learning – building a volunteer project or community service effort into a specific course.
At WSU if you have a service learning component in your class, students can enter their projects into a campus-wide competition that promotes and honors service learning, so this creates additional opportunities for your students as well. Look for a link to more information about service learning in the presentation resources.

9. An Argument for Alternative Projects
Multiple choice exams and essays are useful, but do not replicate work students might do in the real world
Other project types, if well designed, can allow students to demonstrate content knowledge in more authentic ways
A short list of ideas: advertisement, chart or graph, debate, game, legal brief, letter to a friend, literature review or annotated bibliography, play, poem, performance, video, web page, work of art
Rubrics can be used to establish goals and evaluate student work
Even if applied learning or service learning don’t fit your class, we want to encourage you to consider some alternatives to standard multiple choice exams or even essays. Neither of these really replicates the real work students will do in their fields, so where possible we would like to try to find another way to approach the objectives of the course.
There are a lot of ideas available online – I’ve put together a short list here – depending upon your field some may be laughable, but you get the idea. Push the envelope.
And, for all of these sorts of assignments, using rubrics for grading can simplify and accelerate the grading process. We’ll talk about them more in a moment.

10. Oldies Corner: Discussion Forum
Discussion Forums don’t have to be superficial and trite
As you adapt in-class work for online experiences, think hard about the outcomes and how they can be achieved
Don’t let the technology lead your decisionmaking
One of the old standards of the online course is a discussion forum, and it will not be news to you that these are often not done very well. That results in a false sense that discussion is not valuable, but I’m of the opinion that discussion forums online are potentially more effective and useful that discussion in the face-to-face classroom. After all, in the face-to-face classroom, students often get away with hiding and not contributing while other students dominate the conversation, and an online discussion can require that students engage at least at a minimal level – and you set that minimum in your expectations.
One of the early flaws of these sorts of discussions online was the classic way of assigning students to each start their own thread, then respond to a few others. That created an environment of repetitive, shallow discussion – but it was an apparent necessity in the early days of online learning because that made it possible to grade discussion contributions. Now we have tools that will pull student contributions out of the forum no matter where they contributed, so it’s possible to evaluate their contribution to the discussion if the conversation is allowed to be more deep and meaningful, longer threads.
So, if you’re someone who has dismissed the discussion forum as a lost cause, I encourage you to take another look.

11. Assessment & Grading
Okay, now on to a little topic that won’t take much time at all, Assessment and Grading.

12. Quizzes & Exams Ways to use tests Low stakes vs High Stakes assessment
Help draw attention to key concepts
Practice skills and knowledge
Evaluate student learning
Low stakes vs High Stakes assessment
In traditional face-to-face instruction, especially in large classes, we have tended to use quizzes and tests as high stakes events that evaluate student learning. As we’ll discuss when we talk about cheating in a few minutes, that has the impact of increasing the incidence of cheating.
In the face-to-face classroom we might be in the habit of using pop quizzes and shorter assessments, but the temptation there is to do them intermittently as a way of rewarding students for coming to class, etc.
In other cases, like Math classes, homework and quizzes are a critical part of drilling the students on critical skills that they need in a very specific scaffold of material.
The advent of tools like Blackboard and the opportunity to include very small, online quizzing outside of class time for face-to-face classes give us an opportunity to create low-stakes formative assessments that draw student attention to key points and helps lock those concepts down for them, in a way that is so low-value there’s very little incentive to cheat.
For example, in my own Literature class students typically read a novel and three short stories in each two-week unit. Each short story is accompanied by a low-stakes, open book, three question quiz. That quiz has the same effective impact of me sitting next to the student and pointing out a key passage to them, making sure they attend to a specific detail that may be useful in discussion later.
So, think about how you use quizzes and tests – there’s a lot of flexibility there if you look for it.

13. Alternative assessment: Achievements
Create a way to indicate that students are adopting good behaviors
These can be shared with other students if they do not indicate actual grade information
Celebrate course milestones
One last thing I want to talk about before we get into actual grading. One of the things that is critical for student learning is providing feedback to students as they work their way through the material. That feedback is most notably provided in grades, and perhaps in direct conversation with the instructor, but that does not have to be the only way students
Blackboard has a tool called “Achievements” that can be used to award specific behaviors or milestones in the class. It’s important that if you want to share with the class who has earned specific achievements that they NOT convey or even imply grade information, which is protected by FERPA.

14. Grading
And then we get to the work of grading

15. Thinking about Grading
Grades are critical communication with your students
Because of that, strive for your grading to be:
Fair
Timely
Clear & Predictable
Easy to find and access
Grades are critical communication with your students. This is the most impactful, concrete, valuable feedback your students get from you over the course of a term, so it’s important to make sure that your grading is fair, timely, clear, predictable, and easy to access. Blackboard, naturally enough, helps with all of that.

16. FERPA and Grades Grades are protected FERPA information
Don’t discuss grades via
Don’t discuss student grades with parents or other family members
Make sure you complete your FERPA training.
I mentioned FERPA a few minutes ago – FERPA is something you’re going to need to make sure you understand pretty clearly. There’s training you need to complete soon if you have not already.
At the core of FERPA is the idea that grade information belongs to and can be shared only with the student. On the instructional side, a student’s grade may need to be shared with other members of the instructional team, and may be exposed to people who work on the learning management system, etc – we’re all trained in and bound by FERPA. But that means that we need to communicate grades to students in a way that is secure.
A critical concept there is the understanding that is not secure enough to discuss grade information with students. We recommend using Blackboard’s messaging system if you must have a conversation with the student about a grade and can’t do it in person (or via a Zoom chat).

17. Grading Strategies Simple systems are best
Complex weighted systems are more prone to errors
Complex systems are difficult for students to understand
Keep good records in case of appeals
Keep up a predictable pattern for grading (timely grading)
Steal from your colleagues (then say thank you)
In the MRC we are big fans of simple grading strategies. The more complex and arcane your system is, the more prone to problems, and the harder for your students to understand.
If your class requires that you manually grade assignments, we recommend that you have a regular pattern for that grading activity. If you get assignments on Wednesday and always do the grading on Friday, the students will come to see that as reliable, predictable behavior. If you take weeks to grade assignments you cheat the students out of the opportunity to learn from the feedback that the grades give them.
It’s also a great trick, if you’re designing a grading place for a class or for an assignment, to take a look at what some of your colleagues do. Most will be very open with you, and even be flattered that you asked.

18. Using Rubrics to simplify Grading
Blackboard Rubrics simplify grading in blackboard
Can be used for any assignment
Can deliver pre-scripted information to students with a few mouse clicks
Well-designed rubrics are indispensable when grading:
Discussion boards
Written assignments
Projects
Presentations
When we talk about manual grading – which is necessary for anything that the computer can’t grade for you –the use of Rubrics in Blackboard can be a HUGE time saver and help structure your expectations for your students. With a few clicks you can share scripted responses with your students. There’s additional training on Rubrics available, again I’ll link that in the resources section of the conference site.

19. Peer Assessment Peer Assessment is a powerful but complicated tool
Many departments use peer assessment as a matter of course
Others don’t use much at all
If you are planning to create a new Peer Assessment assignment, we recommend consulting with Instructional Design and Access
Accessibility of student created content must be considered
Peer Assessment tools are tricky in Blackboard
Students will have to be trained on how to give their assessments
Some classes have used peer assessment for a very long time, and it can be very effective – but many don’t. When it’s used well, it can be a very effective way for students to practice skills and gain confidence. However, our new focus on accessibility complicates the peer assessment landscape a bit – if we are going to have students create content that will then be assessed by their peers, that content needs to be created in an accessible way. So, if you’re designing a new assignment that will use peer assessment, we recommend that you consult with Instructional Design and Access – a great place to start is to come have a conversation with one of the designers during the blackboard and accessibility labs in the Library (Tuesday and Wednesday, 1-3pm).

20. The Blackboard Grade Book
Blackboard’s gradebook is recommended for all classes,
Easy to share grades with students
Let blackboard archive your grading in case of appeal
The simpler your grading system, the better
Can your course grade be raw points?
Weighted column grading is the primary source of instructor blackboard tickets at the end of the semester.
Make sure you add the ”0” for incomplete work
Blackboard’s gradebook is probably one of the oldest, most constantly used and tested pieces of functionality in Blackboard. We recommend that you use it for all classes, even face-to-face classes because it makes grade information easily available to students, and will have the impact of also archiving your grade book in case of appeal.
For all it’s robustness, Blackboard’s gradebook can be tricky, and so we recommend that you keep your grading structures as simple as possible. Weighted grades can be useful, but when you start combining columns of weighted grades into other columns of weighted grades, it can get complicated and messy fast.
Another critical thing to keep in mind is that the grade book needs you to go in to give students “0” if they don’t complete an assignment. The default blackboard view shows students their current grade based on what each student has turned in so far – so if a student has turned in only one assignment, if you don’t go in and enter a 0 for the assignments he or she has not turned in, they may think they’re still doing well in the class.

21. Cheating
And now the big, unhappy thing we all hate to have to deal with – cheating.

22. First: You’re not going to solve this
Cheating is a human activity
Some academic structures inadvertently encourage cheating
We can move the needle but we can’t get rid of it
First of all, keep in mind, we’re not going to solve cheating. It’s as human as the common cold, and we can create systems that don’t encourage it, but it will never go away, and there will always be people who are willing to spend way more effort “beating the system” than they are willing to spend learning the material. So, make sure you enter this with a fairly zen frame of mind.

23. What Encourages Cheating
Fewer, Higher Stakes exams
Content delivery without engaging student interest
Lack of connection to the class and the instructor
As I said, there are some things that encourage cheating. We need to consider how we can move way from things like having a course with a few, important high-stakes exams, especially multiple choice exams that are machine graded.
We need to avoid delivering content without trying to engage student interest, and we need to build connections between the student and the instructor, the student and the content, and the content and the student’s future.

24. Prevention More frequent, lower stakes quizzes
Projects and exam questions that ask students to draw from their own person judgement and experience (alternative assignments)
Make changes to the content and assessments with some frequency
So you’ll notice that many of the things I’ve been recommending already fit into this plan – we can incorporate more frequent, lower stakes exams, include projects and assignments that require more authentic engagement from the students. It’s also useful to make periodic changes to your course content and assessments, where possible.

25. Detection SafeAssign ProctorU
Available for all assignments in Blackboard
Checks text against a massive database of other text sources to look for substantial signs of plagiarism.
Generates a report – human review is necessary to make a final determination
ProctorU
Live virtual exam proctoring via videoconference.
There is a student fee for this service
And, of course, we have the last resort – the systems we have in place to catch cheaters. Two examples of those tools are SafeAssign and ProctorU.
SafeAssign is a plagiarism detector that can be turned on for any assignemt in Blackboard. Written content that is turned in is evaluated against a massive database of content to look for incidence of plagiarism. The tool generates a report that tells you how much of the material in the submitted text is original. That can be a good indicator that plagiarism is going on, but of course that does require human intervention to come to a final conclusion.
ProctorU is a virtual proctoring service that can be used to monitor students while they are taking online exams. Students are connected to a live proctor via webcam. The proctor verifies the student’s identity, requires that the student use the webcam to show the proctor the space in which the exam will take place to make sure that there aren’t other devices and people in the area, and then monitors the student through the webcam for the entire exam. If there is an anomaly, the service makes a report to the instructor, who can review the recording.
ProctorU is a valuable service for exams that really need it, but there is a fee that students will be charged. The fee varies based on the length of the exam and how many days in advance the student schedules to take the exam. It’s possible to take exams on demand, but that does get more expensive, as you might imagine.
We recommend that if you’re going to require proctoring for exams, you communicate that in the syllabus – including information about the options and fees – and that you also allow students to take advantage of other means of taking the exam in a proctored environment – in the WSU counseling and Testing center, or in the case of remote students taking online classes, and equivalent testing center at another institution.

26. Questions? Need Extra Help with these topics?
Come to the IDA Blackboard Labs
Tuesday and Wednesday (every week)
1-3pm
Ablah Library