An Assigned (online) Assessment in Crowdmark is administered fully online. It allows students to receive the assessment via email and submit their responses digitally within a specific time frame. Students can complete the assessment on paper and take photos using a mobile phone or complete it digitally using Microsoft Word and save it as a PDF file.
This guide outlines the steps to create an Assigned Assessment in Crowdmark.
Before you Begin
- Log in to Crowdmark
- Check if the course you are creating the assignment for is set up in Crowdmark
- The course is set up if you see it listed under Courses section.
- If you do not see it under Courses, refer to this guide to connect your Quercus course to Crowdmark: How do I set up Crowdmark in my course?
Jump to
1. Create New Assessment
- Select your Course (Default Term course in this example).
- Select the Create assessment dropdown.
- Select New assessment
1.1. Add Assessment details
- Add the name of the Assessment.
- Select to include or exclude specific students.
- Select to include or exclude specific members of your teaching team.
- If you approve of the student and instructional team settings, select Save.
1.2. Customize student list (optional)
To customize the list of students who will take this assessment:
- Select Students dropdown menu.
- Select Custom.
- In the Search for a student to include area, begin typing a student's name to initiate the search.
- If you would like to exclude specific students from the assessment, begin typing their name in the Search for a student to exclude to initiate the search.
- Once finished including or excluding students, select Save.
2. Create an Assigned Assessment
- Choose the Assigned (Remote) assessment type.
- Select Next.
To help your students submit more clear and legible hand-written work, please feel free to distribute our guide How can I submit handwritten (or paper-based) work?
2.1. Specify Assessment Settings
- Add a submission Due Date and Time. Submissions after this date and time will be considered late.
- Add a lateness penalty for a late submission (Optional).
- For Additional options, you can add a Timed assessment, where students can start an assessment before the due date and have a specific amount of time to submit, or Group Assessment.
- Select Next
You can change these details at a later time through the assignment settings. For more details, see Changing the due date and penalty.
2.2. Add Questions to Assessment
Now that you have organized which students will take the assessment, you can add questions to your assessment.
- Add an assignment description that outlines the assessment details. You can also attach it as a document with Attach files option.
- Add the point value for your question.
- Add your question:
- Type question text directly into the Question field
- Copy and paste content from a text document. If you paste question content, the formatting will not be maintained and you will have to re-format the text in Crowdmark.
- Attach file with the question using Attach files option.
- Select Add another question for each questions you need to include in the assessment
- Select Save and go to Dashboard!
3. Distribute Assessment to students
Now that your assessment has been fully set up, you can Distribute to students right away or Schedule automatic distribution for a later date and time.
If you’re setting a synchronous exam, where all students will write at the same time, you can use the scheduled distribution function to send out the exam at the designated time. For more information, see Distributing to Students.
After distributing assessment, click on the Students tab to see if students have received or viewed the assessment.
To get an idea of the student workflow after you've distributed your assessment, see What will students see after I distribute the assessment?
4. Grade Assessment
You can start grading an assigned assessment after the due date.
Grading may be conducted by you or by other members of your teaching team. Before you start grading, ensure you've completed Step 4: Add your Teaching Team to Crowdmark from our guide, How do I set up Crowdmark in my course?
To help you decide which roles to assign your teaching team members, please refer to the Crowdmark guide: What is the difference between team member roles?
4.1. Select a question for grading
From the Grading panel on the assessment's Dashboard, select a question (Q1, for example) to enter the grading interface..
4.2. Enter grades and feedback
- Use the grading tools to assign a grade and leave feedback.
- Navigate to the next booklet or next question using navigation options.
For a full list of grading tools for different questions types, including comments, stamps, and free-form annotations, review the Crowdmark guide: Grading Tools
For complete instructions on navigating between questions and booklets, review the Crowdmark guide: Grading navigation
4.3. Return graded assessments to students
Once all the assessments have been graded, you are able to share the grades with your students and export the grades to Quercus.
- Open the Results item on the left-hand menu, and
- Select the student View Settings you would like to include for students to see (i.e., assessment summary message, distribution of scores graph).
Select from the following options under Grades:
- Send grades to students: will send an email to each student containing a link to their score page, which includes their submission, scores, feedback, and additional information you’ve chosen to include.
- Export grades as CSV: will generate a CSV file that can be opened as a spreadsheet and edited in a program like Excel, or imported to the Quercus gradebook using the UT OMR tool.
- Export grades to Quercus: will create a new Assignment group called Crowdmark Assessments in your Assignments page and a new assignment (with a corresponding gradebook column) with the same name as the Crowdmark assessment.
4.4. Download copies of graded assessments (optional)
You may want to keep printed copies of graded assessments to support exam services (i.e., to provide exam copies, and to facilitate grade re-checks or exam re-grading), especially in those cases where you are not releasing the assessments back to students (e.g., for final exams).
From the Results item on the left-hand menu,
- Select the Export graded booklets option under Grades to download a local copy of the graded booklets.
If you want to know more about Crowdmark from an instructor's experience, please see U of T Economics Instructor, Jennifer Murdock's article Instructors' Insights on Crowdmark that outlines tips and best practices for U of T faculty.