Administration of explanations - guide for Planner

This article will cover how Planner can configure administered explanation of grades, follow them up and send the explanation to candidates.

In Inspera Assessment, there is a text field in the Grading tool where graders can write an explanation of the grade, which can be sent to the student. By activating administration of explanations, the "lifecycle" of that explanation is extended. This makes it possible to keep track of and follow up the explanation of grades process, as well as to see if the candidates have actually opened / read the explanation, before any future complaints process is initiated.

Enabling Administration of explanations

Administration of explanations can be activated per test under Options > Explanation of Grades in the test settings.

If Administration of explanations is activated, you will get following choices: 

• Request explanations of all grades: By choosing this the status for all candidates will be updated to Requested. You will be asked to confirm the request. The setting can be changed anytime, but note that by deactivating, you have to manually mark/reset each candidate to Not requested.
• Allow graders to send explanations directly to candidates: The purpose of this setting is to give the planner the option to control when explanations are sent. The setting can be changed at any time.
• Set deadline for explanation: You can set a deadline for when the grader should be finished with the explanation. The deadline is the same for all explanations in the test, and appears for the grader on the candidate's result page. The deadline does currently not include any notification when the deadline runs out. The graders will be notified automatically by email when a deadline changes.

 

Important notes

• If you do not enable Explanation of grades on a test, graders will still be able to send explanation of grades directly to candidates. This functionality is used to request & monitor progress of explanations to candidates.

Functionality - status	Administered explanations	Not administered explanations
Not asked for explanation
Requires explanation
Draft
Done
Sent
Read

• There is no way to assign which grader is going to write the explanation for a specific candidate.

 

Explanation status

The status types will be made visible in the Grading tool and on the results page for the candidates for both the planner and the grader. This forms the basis for events i the log and in automatically notifications. 

In Monitor, there are two separate columns for explanation requests. One column indicates whether an explanation has been requested, and the other column shows the status of the explanation. Use the column picker to show the columns.

Note:  All changes in status are logged, and you can choose to subscribe to notifications by email for such changes. You can read more about customizing notification settings here.

Status: Not requested Explanation of Grade

The planner has not requested an explanation on behalf of the candidate. The grader can still, if desired, write an explanation by pressing "Add".

Status: Requested

The Planner has requested an explanation on behalf of the candidate. This can be managed in two ways:

• From Options:  Request explanations of all grades

When you use this method, you will be prompted to confirm the request. 

• From the candidate list in Monitor: Choose candidate(s) and click "Request explanation". A notification will automatically be sent to the grader in Inspera Assessment.

 When a candidate has requested an explanation, it looks like this on the candidate's results page:

 The grader can start writing the explanation by pressing "Add". The status for the explanation will be updated to Draft.

Status: Draft

The explanation is started on by the grader, but not marked as Ready. As a planner, you can't send a Draft on behalf of the grader.

The grader can mark the explanation as Ready and then send the explanation directly to the candidate, if this has been set by the planner.

Status: Ready

Only one grader has to mark an explanation as Ready. If you are using committees, one grader marks the explanation as ready on behalf of the committee.

An explanation that is marked Ready by the grader can be sent to candidate by the Planner through the Monitor tool. 

As a planner, you can mark all/multiple candidates with status Ready at the same time, and send the explanations to all at the same time (Batch action).

Status: Sent

An explanation that has been sent will immediately be available in the candidate's Archive.

The candidates are not notified by email. 

Status: Read

Status Read means that the candidate has logged in and seen the explanation.