Grade computation



To compute and view the grades, click on the Grades link. Then:
  • Compute the grades: Click on Compute Crowd-Grades.  This will take a moment, and you will be told when to refresh the page to see the new grades.
  • You then have an opportunity to assign final grades, either by copying the Crowd-Grades into final grades, or by entering them by hand (or via a mix of the two).  
  • Show grades to students: Once you are satisfied with the grade assignment, you can select to show the grades to students.  You can hide the grades from view at any time.

How Grades Are Computed

We assume here that you have chosen consensus-based grading. 

Each student is assigned a submission grade, which summarizes the quality of the student's submission, and a review grade, which summarizes the accuracy of the student's reviews.  The submission and review grades are then combined into a single crowd-grade according to percentages specified by the instructor.  The combination of submission and review grades creates an incentive for students to both do their homework well, and be accurate in their grading.

Submission Grade:

  • If the assignment uses a single grading criterion, rather than a grading rubric, then the consensus grade is simply the median of the grades provided by the individual students. 
  • If rubrics are used, then CrowdGrader first computes the consensus grade for each rubric item, as the median of the grades the students provided for that item.  This generates a "consensus rubric" which is shown to the student as feedback.  

Review Grade: The review grade is a measure of how accurate the grades provided by each student are (see here for the details).

Crowd-Grade:  The crowd-grade combines the submission and review grades according to percentages specified by the instructor.  The default is that the submission grade contributes 80% to the crowd-grade, and the review grade contributes 20%. 


What Students See

For each submission, students are shown:
  • The submission grade for the assignment, and the consensus grades for each rubric item, if a rubric is used. 
  • The review grade.
  • The crowd-grade, and the final grade.
  • The text comments that reviewers provided as part of their reviews. 
Note that students are not shown the individual grades present in each review.  This reduces student anxiety  if there are occasional errors or outliers in the individual reviews.