Grade a Forum Participation

1. Click on the Discussion forum's title
2. Click Grade Discussion Forum button.
3. On the Grade Discussion Forum Users page, click Grade in a user's row with a number in the Posts column.
   
   
   
   
4. On the Grade Discussion Forum page, a collection of the student's posts made to the graded forum appears. Because you can assign a forum grade based on multiple threads, all messages posted by a student are included for review. Click Print Preview to open the page in a new window in a printer-friendly format. Posts print in the order they appear on the page. To select which posts appear and in which order, you can filter and sort posts using the Filter function and the Sort By and Order drop-down lists on the action bar.
   
   
   

   The grading sidebar contains the following areas:

   • Forum Statistics: Click the drop-down arrow to access the area that includes information about a user's posts, such as Total Posts, Date of Last Post, Average Post Length, and Average Post Position.
   • Click the down-pointing arrow under to the current user's name to view a list and select a user with posts ready to grade. The selected user's posts appear in the content frame. Use the left- and right-pointing arrows to navigate to the previous or next student.
   • Area to add grade, feedback, and private notes for yourself.

5. In the content frame, evaluate the currently selected user's posts. In the grading sidebar, type a grade. If you associated a rubric for this forum, expand and complete the rubric. To edit an existing grade, click in the Grade box and change the grade.

6. Optionally, type Feedback for the user. In the Add Notes section, make notes that appear only to you (forum manager) and the grader role. You can use the spell check function in the bottom of each text box. The icon for Click to open full content editor gives you access to all the content editor functions.

7. Click Submit to add the grade, feedback, and grading notes to the Grade Center. The grade appears on the Grade Discussion Forum Users page.

How to Access Threads for Grading

You can assign discussion grades to evaluate participants on performance in each thread. When you create or edit a forum, you can enable thread grading options and a Grade Center column is created automatically.

Students cannot create new threads in a forum where threads are graded.

You can create rubrics and refer to them while grading threads, but you must create and associate the rubrics in advance.

After accessing the user's threads to grade, follow the steps outlined in the previous section for inline forum grading.

1. Access the discussion forum containing a thread you want to grade.
2. If a point value has not been added to this graded thread, click the Grade button in the thread's row.
   
   
   
   
3. Enter a "Points possible" value for the thread. Click Submit.
4. On the thread listing page, click Grade Thread in the thread's row.
   
   
   
   
5. On the Grade Discussion Thread Users page, click Grade in a user's row with a number in the Posts column.
6. On the Grade Discussion Thread page, a collection of the student's posts made to the graded thread appears. Since you can assign a thread grade based on multiple messages, all messages posted by a student are included for review. Click Print Preview to open the page in a new window in a printer-friendly format. Posts print in the order they appear on the page. To select which posts appear and in which order, you can filter and sort posts using the Filter function and the Sort By and Order drop-down lists on the action bar.
7. Provide a grade, feedback, and grading notes. After clicking Submit, the information is added to the Grade Center. The grade appears on the Grade Discussion Thread Users page.