how do I hide grades on student posts?

Yes, I’m using the Post Level plugin to allow students to write private posts that I can see. However, I haven’t really taught students how to use it, because no one has asked. This is a writing course and they’re supposed to be exchanging papers and doing peer reviews the entire semester.

The post-level plugin makes it so if they choose 10 in a drop-down box, only an administrator can see it.

thanks for that info Tom. handy to know.

To answer Tomn’s question – yes, you *can* password protect an entire site. You can also password-protect each individual page – either seperately or along with the site protection.

And no, if a site is password-protected, it will not be indexed by search engine spiders (they’d need the password to get in there and crawl it).

You can easily password protect and entire site – usually through your webhost admin panel. Mine uses CPanel, and all I have to do is click on the directory I was to protect and put in a password – it’s that easy. Then no one can surf to the site without putting in the password to see it. Yours is probab;y a school administered area – so you’d probab;y have to call your IT department to get them to password-protect the directory that the site resides in. but it can be easily done ??

edit: I didn’t read the whole thread before posting, so a few of the ideas here have already been mentioned…

“However, some students may feel uncomfortable if I put their grade in plain view of everyone else.”

It’s not just a matter of some students feeling uncomfortable – it’s a big legal issue. I’m not sure what the differences between the laws for college and high school are, but the student privacy ones are likely very similar.

At my University a few years ago, a student sueed a professor for using the age-old procedure of returning homework in boxes with their names on it (which had a side-effect of allowing everyone to see who got what grade… etc.) The student won and the professor lost his job. Now every class that returns homework in boxes requires students to get a CID assigned to them for each class. This CID is random, unique, and different for each course a student takes that semester.

You could always require students to use CIDs to post things. Of course, with things like essays and classes in high school (I’m guessing it’s high school) people are likely able to figure out who wrote what… in college it would be difficult to figure that out based on the large pool of loosely connected people taking each course…

If I understand the law correctly… as long as the identity is protected, the grade can be public. This could be a positive thing for you because it would show consistency of grading regardless of who the student was – or it might bite you in the rear if one student notices that student CID #413 had a paper he considered worse than his get a score 10 point higher…

Just some thoughts of alternate ways of doing it… It seems to be a very popular way at college.

Oh – and about Blackboard… My university uses that. I hate it. I could go on and on and on about why I hate it – but I’ll just leave it at: It’s clunky, unreliable, ugly, and inconvenient. Our CS department could have done a much better job at creating an elegant and truly useful solution….

RyeBrye,

Thanks for your comment. I used WebCT at a university I previously taught at and I hated it too — seems like those systems try to make web building easy, but in reality they are just another system to learn, no harder than actual html.

Re legal issues, yes, this is on my radar. I didn’t know there were actual privacy laws that included this, though. Thanks. I sure wish there were a grading plugin of some kind. This seems to be the only thing that WordPress lacks.

Sounds like you want a plugin that will let you make a “private” comment, than only the admin and the author can read. I don’t know of such a plugin, but it seems many people would like one. And then there are others who think such a thing is anti-blog. But hey, wordpress is a CMS too, and not just anymore.

I have no idea how to write such a plugin, as I’ve looked at the comment system. I would have one concern though, and that would what happens if the plugin is off (as in after an update, and it’s now imcompatible). I think it would need to make it so the comment can only be read by the owner or admin if the plugin is running. Perhaps through md5’ing it? Or perhaps using an extra field entirely attached to the post for private comments.

Maybe a private tag would suffice instead. That might be simplier.

or, setup a WP-MU system, let each student have their own blog, make comments always go to moderation, and thus they’ll be seen (and left in moderation) only by the student/owner.

-d

Actually, while a private comment plugin would be nice, in the larger scheme of grades it does not work so well. Reason being, as an instructor, over the course of a semester you may receive 30 different assignments from 30 different students. How will you keep track of 900 different grades, each sent as a private comment? Worse, as a private comment on different blogs?

Here’s what I’m planning to do. I am using Frontpage’s web components to create an excel spreadsheet. Then I am creating two columns: one for student names, and the other for student IDs. When I enter grades, I work with the file in Frontpage, and before I save it, I’ll hide the column with the student names and then protect the active sheet.

As far as I know, there’s no way for students to view the names column after it’s been hidden. I may be wrong about this — maybe some of you could easily hack into that. But I don’t know of any other way to easily record, tabulate, and distribute grades anonymously to students.

You would be safer if you just saved a version after you delete the names column. No chance of hacking the names if they’re not there!

You just mentioned that the students are spread across different blogs? I thought this was all one blog.

In the spirit of keeping this frontpage less, or more to the point, entirely in wordpress, I think what you (or any teacher) really need is a custom plugin specifically for managing grades. Let me know if something like this might work …

Student composes assignement, or perhaps attaches assignement as a .pdf in wordpress as a post. There should be another field of information with the post that includes an assignment name or number. (Do you already have that? how do you know which assignment it is?) You, as a teacher read the assignment, and click an option to write/edit a grade and comment. This is not a regular comment in the wordpress sense, but a separate box of information that is bound to the post. Only a person with sufficient priviledge will be able to edit that data, and only the student/user and teacher will be able to see it when they are logged in. It could also send an email to student if the appropriate option is selected upon an edit. You as a teacher have access to a page that will display a list of the grades organized by assignment, or student, and optionally generate an excel spreadsheet.

I believe the above wouldn’t be terribly difficult to code. I’d like to know if you think that would work for you, and where you would change it. I’m also thinking about my brother the teacher, and may wish to put my time into something like this so he could benefit as well. I know how to code it outside of wordpress, but would need to study wordpress a bit to know how to properly integrade it as a simple plugin.

Manstraw, if you could develop that grading plugin as you described, it would be perfect. I’m telling you, give WordPress one year and some super-techie teacher will put together a customized theme that puts both WebCT and Blackboard out of business. Particularly for writing classes, where peer reviews and commenting is frequent, WordPress really excels.

Did you already see my site? Email me if you want access, b/c it’s password protected. You asked how I’m managing assignments. Basically I made each assignment its own category, and then I have students select the category their assignment belongs to. Some students forgot to select it, so I decided to just set the default category to the assignment they’re supposed to turn in.

Something that has proven to be invaluable is a little piece of code that allows the category description to automatically display above the category post.

<?php if ( is_category() ) : ?>
<h2 id=”category-name-header”>
<?php echo $cache_categories[$cat]->cat_name ?></h2>
<?php add_filter(‘category_description’, ‘wpautop’); ?>
<?php add_filter(‘category_description’, ‘wptexturize’); ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

I put the above right before the loop in my archives.php page.

If I need to change the assignment, I just change the description in the admin menu (manage > categories), rather than going into a custom page template and changing it. Very helpful.

Another helpful thing that I wished I’d looked at more is integrating the Ocacia Bar (Admin menu) at the top of the site. I realized in aftermath that my theme didn’t really accomodate it, so I’ll have to change that at some point. It makes it much simpler for students.

I still think WP-MU, with the teacher(s) as admins, would do pretty well.

However, your grades could be done a number of different ways. The simplest was discussed earlier and is analogous to my WP-MU-musings (mu-mu, love that)… effectively, private comments, or forced-moderation on everything. Only the post author or an admin should be able to see the moderated comments. It removes the need for a ‘private messaging’ system, though you’d want to default to ‘private’ so that you never accidentally post something ‘public’.

Or, just have everything default to moderated, so only the admin or the post-author can ‘publish’ the comment to the public.

I’d have to look at the current comment-system code, to see what ‘authority’ the post-author has versus an admin-level user…

-d

I was in your site back when you made a guest password available. I ‘saw’ it, but didn’t retain everything I saw. Doing each assignment as a category makes perfect sense of course. I might have thought of that if I had a teacher mind. ??

I’m putting that grade plugin thing on my pile. I have no idea when I’ll get to it, as the pile is a bit high right now.

@davidchait – I’ve never touched mu. Don’t know a thing about it. If I still wanted to write a plugin for a private message as I’ve described, would I be looking at pretty much the same task? Or would mu present me with some extra learning? I’ll basically be writing everything to an extra table in the database, and refer to post a post number.

When I was setting up my course, I looked at a few courses where each student had his or her own blog site (I think https://edublogs.org/ lets you have as many blogs as you want). While this could be advantageous in some courses, it seemed to me that students didn’t interact much with other students writing because to do so, they had to totally go into another site. Some sites were pretty vacant, giving the student’s domain an empty, unvisited feel.

That’s why I brought all students into the same blog site. I have to admit, though, that I wanted to play around with WordPress MU, but I had trouble installing it. Do you know where any good instructions for that are? I have cPanel, so I’ve always used the one-click install Fantastico feature.

Back to the class blog. With grades and comments, I see your point with the moderated level being automatically private. However, I actually <i>want </i>students to read my comments (just not the grades). As a teacher, I’ve seen a lot of peer reviews, and I can count on my hand the number of peer reviews that were actually worthwhile. I’m not saying my comments are brilliant, but they are more substantial than the average student’s peer comment. I want students to learn by example how to comment, how to analyze, etc. The more students can read my comments, and comment on my comments and other students comments, then the more interactivity and student writing community I can build.

Also, knowing that every student can read my comments keeps me in check. I have to make sure I’m being fair.

Ummm. I guess my only problem with your last statement is: if you give a glowing comment, the person probably got a high grade. If you tear it apart, they got a low grade. I’m just thinking back to when I was a student — and I guess if you asked around, people would say if you have glowing things to say, yeah let others see it, otherwise I’d prefer the comments be private to just me. If >I< decide I want to make your comments to me public, that’s then MY decision.

Anyway, just IMHO. I know at some schools there are varying policies on whether grades MUST be kept private, or if posted publicly must be posted by student ID (because, yeah, I NEVER knew anyone else’s ID… right…).

I could see using one of the existing rating plugins, somehow modify it so only the author or admin can see the result, and only admins can set the value… that might ‘just work’. I could also see using a custom field, go into edit mode on the student’s post and enter the grade, and then a few lines of custom code in the template would show the custom field only if the current user is an admin or is the post author. That’d be dead easy. Actually, even if doing as a plugin, could still easily use the custom field system for storing the grade. I mean, you’re storing the grades offline, this is just to ‘report’ them to the students, right?

-d

I created an excel spreadsheet that lists grades by a student ID number, which no one knows but the student. I will get some feedback today as to whether this method is acceptable by students or not.