Crowdmark

Crowdmark is a platform for grading handwritten student submission. These can be either regular assignments or exams. Crowdmark is especially well suited to distributed marking in teams.

Your CrowdMark support staff in the Faculty of Mathematics is Sean Speziale.

IST is now keeping a knowledge base for Crowdmark. That knowledge base may be more current than what is listed here. (See also the IST overview of Crowdmark)

Getting Started with CrowdMark

Creating a course on CrowdMark

To create a Crowdmark class from Learn, you must sign in to Crowdmark with your Learn credentials by selecting University of Waterloo from Crowdmark's institutional sign-in page.

Then, you can import a course from "My Courses", and select the appropriate Learn course.

For more information, read about how Crowdmark works with Brightspace (Learn).

Syncing class roster

Go to Students, then Sync with LMS.

You should verify the data entry fields Crowdmark is using matches the ones from Learn, then continue on to update your student list to match the student list in your Learn course. (Tip: Student email address on CrowdMark should match the student email address on Learn.)

For more information, read about importing students from Learn.

Adding/removing students

You can add students manually and individually by following these instructions.

If enrolling en masse from Learn, then follow these instructions.

Handling inquiries from students not receiving CrowdMark emails

You can resend emails if students have not received them.

First, ensure they are enrolled in your Crowdmark class by checking your class list.

If they are, follow the instructions on resending assessment submission emails to students.

Assignments

Creating an assignment

To create an assessment, you can use the "Create Assessment" button from your course page.

For more information, read about creating an assessment.

You can create two different types of assessments, assigned and administered.

Assigned assessments are used for homework or assignments, where students upload answers themselves.

Administered assessments are used for paper exams or tests, where instructors would upload the scans.

For more information, read about choosing an assessment type.

Setting due dates and late submission penalties

During the assessment setup, you’ll be prompted to enter a due date and (optionally) a penalty for late submissions.

For more information, read about due dates and penalties.

Waiving submission penalties for individuals

Go to the Students tab for the assessment.

Find the student using the search bar and click on the link beside their email under the Submitted at column.

A window should show student submissions. Scroll down to the submission settings.

You can customize the penalty, which is given regardless of how late the assignment is handed in.

Click anywhere in the window or hit enter to save the customized penalty for this student. You will see a gear icon in the Submitted at column for this student if the adjustment is successful.

For more information, read about penalty for a particular student

Distributing assignments to students

Have the student read about how to fix student UWaterloo email. Once their UWaterloo email is working again the course instructor will have to resend the Crowdmark online assignment URL to the student.

Also, the following Crowdmark pages may be of use:

Distributing an Assignment At a Scheduled Time

What Will Students See After I Distribute the Assessment

Submitting on behalf of students

If students are unable to submit an assignment (often due to foreign country internet blocks), instructors can submit on their behalf

Exams and Midterms with Odyssey

Set-up

If you are using Odyssey for exam management, the Crowdmark set-up is different. Create the exam in Odyssey and select "Crowdmark" from the integration. The exam will get set-up for you by Odyssey (i.e. you do not need to follow the assignment set-up as described above)

LaTeX templates

Since Crowdmark exams all have QR codes on each page for scanning, you need to ensure your page set-up has space for this. This LaTeX template:Cmark-Exam-Template.tex may be of assistance.

Grading

Creating a comment library and sharing it with others

1. Press the book icon in the grading toolbar

2. Add or edit comments using the "Add comment" and pencil icon, respectively

3. Save

Of note: You can share your comment library with other markers.

You can drag to change the order of the comments.

You can assign point values to the comments, which can be dragged onto student work to add that number of points to their mark.

Importing and exporting comment libraries can be handled from the Dashboard's Administration panel. Read more at the link below for specific details.

Read more:

How to add comments to student work

How to create and edit comments in the comment library

How to use a rubric (comments with point values)

How to import and export a comment library

Basic Grading

You must have a Crowdmark account to grade assignments.

Click into a question to begin grading. Once you’re on the grading screen, you’ll see toolbars on the left and right-hand sides of your screen. On the left-hand side, you’ll see your grading tools.

You can leave comments, input points, and scroll through different questions to grade.

You can read more about how to begin grading the assessment, or also general navigation, and read more about the specific tools you can use and what they do, click here.

Grading using a rubric

Grading using a rubric can be as simple as dragging and dropping a comment with point values onto student work, which will add the point value of the comment to the student's points.

To read more, using a rubric.

Grading a subset of questions

You have the option of grading students' work by question.

If you wish to review the grading done by graders, you can filter the graded questions as follows:

While grading, click Filter evaluations in the top right corner.

Click on a tag, enter a score, or click a grader to select filter(s).

Click Apply filters.

This way, you can see who marked what and a host of other information depending on tags the graders applied, which you can learn about tagging questions.

To learn about filtering evaluations, filtering evaluations.

Viewing student submissions

If something goes wrong and a student claims they submitted an assignment, you can see their submission history to verify this.

Follow the detailed instructions listed here.

Adding graders

To learn more about adding and removing graders for a course, click here.

Assigning marking duties (considering gaps among the booklets)

You can split up marking duties easily by question if you wish. If there are "gaps" among the booklets, that is, there are questions in a booklet where no answer was submitted, then Crowdmark handles this in the cases of assignments, and in assessments, you may see a blank response form.

You can read more about grading a remote exam here.

Posting Grades

Posting grading results to students

You can see how to return the graded assessment, how to send messages to students after grading is complete, and if storing the grade data elsewhere, how to export the list of grades.

Pushing grades to Learn

Note to all users: LEARN is D2L software, and D2L is a product of Brightspace.

You must initially import students from D2L/Learn to the Crowdmark class.

You can read more about that here.

After you have done that, you can visit Results > Export grades to Brightspace (under Send and export grades) in order to send the grades to Learn.

Read more about this

How to regrade a booklet that is graded by other graders

As an instructor or facilitator, you should have the ability to change the grade of a booklet that is graded by other graders.

See more about different roles here.

Handling regrading inquiries (updating Learn gradebook after regarding)

You should be able to visit a student's submission and simply change the grade for the appropriate questions. If you locked the assessment, read about how to unlock it so you can change the grade. Else, you should be able to simply export the grades again from Crowdmark to Brightspace (Learn).