Evaluations

What an evaluation is

An evaluation is one round of peer evaluation for a class, for example Final Term: Group Project. A class can have several. Each one pins one rubric and one roster snapshot.

Creating an evaluation

Open the class, go to its evaluation list, and use New evaluation. You will set:

• Title and the rubric to use.
• Evaluation scope: who each student evaluates. Typically their own group; the app checks the scope against group size.
• Minimum evaluations: how many peers a student must score before they are considered done. The app warns if this is set so that fewer than 3 evaluators could land on any one student, because results are withheld below 3 (see Reports & Results).
• Self evaluation (on by default): whether each student also scores themselves. When on, the self score is shown next to the peer consensus but is not mixed into it.
• Open and close times: schedule when the evaluation opens to students and when it closes automatically. You can also open and close it by hand.
• Instructions: free text shown to students on the evaluate screen.

While an evaluation is a draft you can change any of these.

Activation

Activate takes the evaluation from draft to scheduled/open. At that moment:

• The rubric is copied into rubric_snapshot and frozen.
• The roster is copied into the evaluation’s student list and frozen.

From here on there is no edit path for that evaluation’s rubric or roster. A correction means a new evaluation with a new snapshot, the same rule as rubrics.

The lifecycle

An evaluation moves through these states:

State	Meaning
Draft	Being set up. Everything editable.
Open	Students can submit. Live rollup visible to you.
Closed	Submissions stopped. You review and moderate.
Reviewing	You are excluding bad ratings / approving notes before release.
Released	Students can see their own results.

Opening and closing can happen on the schedule you set or manually from the evaluation view. There are guards around reopening an evaluation once it has been closed. The app will tell you when an action is blocked and why.

The evaluation view

An evaluation has four tabs: Results, Notes, Network & matrix and Settings. Notes appears only when note approval is on for the evaluation, and shows a count of flagged notes while you are moderating. Settings shows the locked settings summary, the instructions, and the rubric and roster snapshots.

A status strip under the title shows what state the evaluation is in and the next action:

• Closed: Start moderation (when note approval is on) or Release results, plus Reopen….
• Moderating notes: Review notes opens the Notes tab, then Release results.
• Released: Preview as student shows exactly what a student sees, and Reopen… brings the evaluation back to open.