Grading of quizes without seeing student identifiers

There are times when faculty might want to set things up so that they can grade a quiz or exam in Moodle without seeing the student names, so that they are not biased in their grading. That is, so that when grading, they can’t see who wrote which answer to each question. It turns out that this is not too hard to achieve!

For each Quiz in which you’d like to grade this way:

Go into the course in Moodle in which you want to grade without seeing student names.
1. Click on the Quiz item (or an Exam for which you are using the Moodle Quiz Functionality)
2. Under the name of the quiz, select the More drop-down, and select Permissions from that list
3. In the Filter field, type “See student”
4. This will highlight two Capabilities:
  “See student identity field while grading”
  “See student names while grading”
5. In the right column, under Prohibited, click the + sign
6. Add the role which you’d like to use for anonymous grading (we recommend Teaching Assistant, or Grader for this)
7. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for both Capabilities
Now you’re ready to grade!
1. Go up to the icon with your image and name, and from the drop-down menu, select “Switch role to…” and choose the role you previously prohibited from seeing student identifiers while grading.
2. Navigate to the Quiz again, and select Manual Grading from the selection box right under the word Quiz.
3. For each question, in the total column, select “grade all”
4. This will enable you to grade every response in the quiz without seeing who wrote each response.
Don’t forget to return to your normal role to see the grade totals for each student.

You’ll need to undertake these steps for each Quiz which you’d like to grade without seeing the students names or identifiers. While we recommended using the TA or Grader roles for this, you could use other roles with access to grading. Just make sure that you’re using a role which you are not also using for other purposes in the course.