Introduction

In the workflow panel you will find two workflows that give you both an overview of the explanations and the possibility to manage explanations if this is activated on the test.

• Explanations overview
  This workspace is a simple list of candidates and explanations. Here you can see the status of the explanations and do some tasks such as requesting explanation on behalf of a candidate (if enabled), and use shortcuts to show the explanation the grader has written. 
• Explanations 
  This workspace contains panels with candidate list, question list and explanations for the candidate.  Here you can also both request an explanation and send the explanation if administration of explanations is activated on the test. 

This guide will cover how you as a planner can

• Request explanations for the candidates
• Keep track of the explanation status
• How and when explanations can be sent to the candidates

Administration of explanations is set up in the test settings. 

Administrated explanations or not?

What you can and cannot do on the workspaces Explanations overview and Explanations depends on whether the test is set up with administration of explanations or not. 

When explanations are not administered, the grader is responsible for both writing and sending explanations to the candidates. You, as a planner, have access to the status, but you cannot send explanations on behalf of the grader, and you cannot register that the candidate has requested an explanation. For more information on how the graders works with explanations, see the grader guide for explanations.

The workspaces for explanations are still available to you, but the rest of this guide assumes that administrated explanations is enabled on the test.

Request explanations for the candidates

You can always request explanation in the old way, either by using the test setting to request explanations for all candidates, or by registering request for explanations in Monitor. 

Instructions for this can be found in this article.

In the marking tool, you can request explanation on behalf of the candidate on both of the workspaces. 

1. In the workspace Explanations overview, you can request explanation in two ways. 

• Right-click the candidate. 
• Click on the three dots on to the far right of the candidate in the list. 

Both ways give you the same menu, where you can choose to request explanation on behalf of the candidate. If you want to remove the request for the explanation, then the choice for it is on the same place. 

Currently, we do not support this action for more than one candidate at a time. There is a shortcut in the header - options, where you can open the candidate list in Monitor directly from the marking tool, and select multiple candidates who have requested explanations.

2. In the workspace Explanations you will find the option for each candidate above the field where the graders write the explanation. 

Here you can see who can edit the explanation, when it can be sent and the status of the explanation. 

3. In Monitor, you can also request explanations for several candidates at once. If so, read this article on how to do it. 

There is a shortcut in the header - options, where you can open the candidate list in Monitor directly from the marking tool. 

Keep track of explanation status

In the workspace Explanations overview, and in the column Explanation request, you can see which candidates you have requested explanations on behalf of. Here you will find three different statuses: 

• Not set (for test without administered explanations)
• Not requested
• Requested

The status of each explanation is always updated in the column Explanation status. The statuses that will show here are these:

• Not started
• Draft
• Ready
• Sent

It is quite normal for the grader to start writing explanations before the marking is completed and before the candidate has requested an explanation. The status of the explanation will be updated throughout the marking process. 

Send explanations

Explanations can be sent when the candidates has received a final grade, and the grader has marked the explanation as ready to be sent. So you can only send explanations that have the status Ready. 

New in Marking 2.0 is that it is not necessary to wait until the entire test has the status marking complete, it is sufficient that the candidate has received the final grade.

You can send the explanations from both the workspaces Explanations overview and Explanations. Currently, we do not support this action for more than one candidate at a time. 

In Explanations overview, you can right-click the candidate again, or click on the three dots on the far right to bring up the options. Choose Explanation - View and edit. 

You will then see a window where you can see the explanation, and a Send button is available and active. 

From the workspace Explanations, the send button is available in the right panel below the explanation itself. 

When the explanation is sent to the candidate, the explanation status is updated to Sent.