Grading an oral exam

Background

As a grader, you need to evaluate the participant's answers in an oral exam:

• The scheduler prepares your grading tasks.
  For each grading task, you will see the list of sessions you need to grade.
• The scheduler also determines how you should do this grading: synchronously or asynchronously.
  • In the case of synchronous (or live) grading, you need to be present in the exam room together with the participant. You need to have your grading task opened on your computer in order to be able to start grading as soon as the participant starts answering. 
  • Asynchronous grading can be done remotely. You can start whenever you want. The only prerequisite to start is that the participants have finished their exams.

Opening a grading task

Proceed as follows to open a grading task:

1. Go to Grading > Grading tasks.
   Result: The tab Assigned to me is opened and you see the overview of your grading tasks. The grading tasks are listed by deadline. By default, the tasks with the closest deadline are at the top.

   Tip: Check the status of your grading task to know whether you can start grading. See below.

2. Click on a grading task to open it.
   Result: At the left, you see the name and optionally the instruction and deadline of your grading task. At the right, you see the session(s) you need to grade in this grading task. 

Status of your grading tasks

A grading task can have the following statuses:

• Published: the grading task has been scheduled for you, but the exam sessions are not yet available for you to start grading. 
• Live: the grading task is available for you to grade.
• Closed: the grading task has been closed by the scheduler. It is no longer available for you to grade.  

Grading a participant's exam

Proceed as follows to grade a participant's exam:

1. Open your grading task. More info.
2. Click Start grading next to the participant's session you want to grade.
   Note: The sessions overview is automatically refreshed every 10 seconds. In the case of:

   • synchronous grading, the Start button becomes available as soon as the participant starts the exam. You additionally see a 'Live' blinking icon next to the participant name.
   • asynchronous grading, the Start button becomes available only after the participant finished the exam. 
   Result: You automatically navigate to the first gradable item of the participant's session. At the top of the screen, you see the navigation bar containing all oral items in the exam. The first item is highlighted. In the left part of your screen, you see the participant's screen recording including the webcam recording of the participant. At the right, you see the grading screen.

   Notes:

   • The navigation bar only shows the oral items that need to be graded. In case the exam also contains information pages, these are not shown in the navigation bar. 
   • In the case of synchronous grading, you will see the participant's screen recording for all items in the oral exam (i.e. also for the information pages). Only when the participant answers an oral item, the item is highlighted in red in the navigation bar. 
     
   • In case of asynchronous grading, the participant's screen recording is only available for the oral items (not for the information pages). 
3. Grade the participant's answer. For more info on grading by means of criteria or a rubric, see Grading items. 

   Note: In the case of synchronous grading, you can only start grading the item when the participant has opened the item. When the participant is not on the same item as you are, you will see an information message:

   • Waiting for the participant to open this item when the participant is behind you.
   • The participant is no longer on this item when the participant is ahead of you.

   Tip: You can see the grading history by clicking on the History tab at the bottom. 

4. Click Confirm and next to confirm your grade. 
   Result: You automatically navigate to the next oral item in the participant's session. 
5. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have graded all the oral items in the participant's session. 
6. On the last item, click Confirm to leave the participant's session. 
   Result: You return to the overview of the sessions you need to grade. 

Finishing a grading task

When you have graded all sessions in your grading task, you need to finish your grading task to inform the scheduler that the grades are available.

Proceed as follows to finish your grading task:

1. Open your grading task. More info.
2. Click Finish task in the top right corner.
   Result: You will see a confirmation message. 

   Note: The confirmation message will contain a warning if the grading task contains sessions that are not or not completely graded. Make sure that all items in all sessions are graded. 

3. If the confirmation message contains a warning about ungraded items or sessions, click Cancel and complete the grading first. More info.
4. If the confirmation message contains no warning about ungraded items or sessions, click Finish.