All assignments, quizzes, and discussion questions can be graded within both the Gradebook and the Worklist. Participation grades can be graded from the Gradebook.
The Gradebook shows all graded and ungraded assessments for the whole class. The assessments in the Gradebook are split by the corresponding topic of the class.
To access the Gradebook, click the Gradebook option from the side menu on the left. The Gradebook will show a total number of items that are ready to be graded.
When first accessing the Gradebook, the Gradebook will be filtered to the current topic. Select Filter By in the top right corner to filter by Topic, Status, Traits, and Assessment Types.
Once you select the filters, select Apply Filters. Once you apply the filters, the assessments matching the filter will appear. You will see a grey horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page. Moving that scroll bar on the bottom of the Gradebook will show any other assessments that are found.
You can also use the Student Search feature to search for a specific student by name or Student ID number.
From the Gradebook, you will also have the ability to submit final grades. Check out the article (Halo | Learn) Submitting Final Grades for more information.
The Worklist shows just the ungraded submitted assessments in the order of that they were submitted. From the Worklist, only assignments, discussion questions, and quizzes can be graded.
To access the worklist, click the Worklist option from the side menu on the left. If there are items to be graded, you will see the total number of ungraded submissions next to the Worklist option.
When first accessing the Worklist, the Submissions tab will be selected. The Submissions tab shows all ungraded assessments that have been submitted. The Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes tabs shows just the ungraded attempts for those types of assessments. If you want to see all the overdue assessments, select the Overdue tab.
You can also apply a filter to the list of assessments shown in the Worklist. Select Filter By in the top right corner to filter by Topic, Traits, and Assessment Types.
Grading Assessments
When grading, one thing to keep in mind is that you can only grade assignments, discussion questions, and quizzes once a submission has been made or the due date has passed. Participation grades can be entered prior to the due date at the instructor’s discretion. Additionally, if you find that you cannot grade an assignment, DQ, or quiz even after the due date has passed, it may be because the student has accommodations. Students who have been granted accommodations have an additional 14 days to complete assignments. Lastly, faculty cannot reassign an assignment to a sooner due date, only a later due date.
There are two views that you may see when grading the assessments, the List View and the Detailed View. In the accordions below we walkthrough the grading process in the Detailed View. If you would like to learn about the List View, select List View below or the Bulk Grading option.
Halo now provides instructors with the ability to bulk grade multiple students at once through the List View. While this option is available for different assignment types, it’s most commonly used for overdue assignment grading, or bulk grading assignments worth 0 points. From this List View, you will be able to add a final score and comments to multiple students at once. This option will not be ideal for all assessments, as some require additional information like rubrics to be completed before the grades can be published.
- To access the List View, select Gradebook from the left side of your Halo Classroom.
- Select Start grading on the assignment you’d like to grade to open the List View.
- The List View shows all submissions for the selected assignment, quiz, discussion forum, or participation that needs to be graded for your course.
The Detailed view provides an expanded view of the student’s submission. This view will allow you to view specific information like the LopesWrite report and rubric. When grading assignments, we recommend using this view to provide grades tailored to the student’s submission. The steps in this article will go through the process of grading each type of assessment through the Detailed View. Please select the appropriate accordion below to see step-by-step instructions on grading the type of assessment that you are wanting to grade.
- You can access the Detailed View through the Gradebook or the Worklist on the left side of your Halo Classroom.
- To access it through the Gradebook, select the point value for the student needing to be graded.
- For the Worklist, select the Grade Submission button.
Click the appropriate drop-down menu below for steps on how to grade each type of assessments found in the Halo online classroom.
- To start grading assignment submissions in the Detailed View, select Grade Submission on the Worklist. Alternatively, if you’re attempting to grade a specific student’s submission for an assignment on the Gradebook, locate the assignment that you would like to grade and click on the point value for that student.
NOTE If you find that you cannot grade an assignment even after the due date has passed, it may be because the student has accommodations. Students with accommodations have an additional 14 days to complete assignments. - After you open the Detailed View, you can switch students by selecting Next in the upper right corner. You can view the assignment details by clicking the Assessment Title in the top left corner. You will also see how many assignments are left to grade next to the assessment title.
- The status of the submission and submission date are located just below the student’s name. If LopesWrite was required, you can view the LopesWrite report by selecting Similarity Score.
NOTE If there was no submission made to LopesWrite by the student, Halo will automatically submit the assignment to LopesWrite upon submission. As a result, the Similarity score may say LopesWrite Report In Progress until the report is finished processing. - If the assignment asked for multiple files, you can switch between the files at the top of the assignment preview window.
- If there is a rubric on the right side, the criteria will be listed. Clicking on the arrow to the left of a criteria description will show the breakdown of the criteria. You can leave a grade for the criteria and rubric comments here.
- On the right side of the assignment under the Rubric icon is the Instructor Comments icon. Select this to enter the instructor comment for the assignment.
NOTE If you want to format your comment before publishing it, press the three dots at the top of the text editor to get more text formatting options.
- When you are ready to publish the grade and move on to the next student, click the Publish & Next button in the top-right corner. If you are not ready to publish, your comments and rubric progress will save automatically.
NOTE You can only publish an assignment grade that has the Instructor Comment filled out and the Rubric point values selected. The only exception to this rule is when the assignment status is Overdue. If the status is Overdue, it is not necessary to fill out the rubric.
- To start grading assignment submissions in the Detailed View, select Grade Submission on the Worklist. Alternatively, if you’re attempting to grade a specific student’s submission for an assignment on the Gradebook, locate the assignment that you would like to grade and click on the point value for that student.
- In the top-right corner, you can update the final score of the quiz by changing the value of the score.
- The Instructor Comments icon is visible on the right side of the screen for the quiz.
- When you are ready to publish the grade and move on to the next student, click the Publish & Next button in the top right corner. If you are not ready to publish, your comments and rubric progress will save automatically.
- To start grading assignment submissions in the Detailed View, select Grade Submission on the Worklist. Alternatively, if you’re attempting to grade a specific student’s submission for an assignment on the Gradebook, locate the assignment that you would like to grade and click on the point value for that student.
NOTE Students cannot submit a group assignment until groups have been assigned. For more information about assigning groups, check out the article (Halo | Learn) Managing Groups. - On the Detailed View page, you can view the assignment description by clicking Assessment Title in the top-left corner. The status of the submission and submission date are located just below the Assessment Title. The group name and Attempt History is at the top of the page. If LopesWrite was required, you can view the LopesWrite report by selecting Similarity Score. If there was no submission made to LopesWrite by the student, you can submit the assignment manually to LopesWrite by clicking Send for Report.
NOTE If there was no submission made to LopesWrite by the student, Halo will automatically submit the assignment to LopesWrite upon submission. The Similarity score may say LopesWrite Report In Progress until this report has finished processing. - If the assignment asked for multiple files, you can switch between the files at the top of the assignment.
- If there is a rubric on the right side, the criteria will be listed. Clicking on the arrow to the left of a criterion will show the breakdown of each. You can leave a grade for the criteria and comments here.
- If you would like to apply a different grade and leave a comment for individual members, select the Instructor Comments icon.
- On the right side you will see a Shared Group Score and Comments section, as well as the Individual Score and Comments section. You can apply a new final score and comment to each member in the group by selecting Individual Grade for the student you’d like to grade separately.
NOTE If you change an individual member's grade, the Instructor Comments to that member must be filled out. - When you are ready to publish the grade and move on to the next group, click the Publish & Next button in the top-right corner. If you are not ready to publish, your comments and rubric progress will save automatically.
NOTE You can only publish an assignment grade that has both the Instructor Comment filled out and the Rubric point values selected. The only exception to this rule is when the assignment status is Overdue. If the status is Overdue, it is not necessary to fill out the rubric.
From the Gradebook and Worklist, you can grade students’ responses to the main discussion question. If you want to grade students’ participation within the class, please see the Grading Participation section of this article.
- To start grading discussion questions, select Start Grading or click on a point value for a student’s discussion topic in the Gradebook. If you are in the Worklist, select Grade Submission.
- On the individual grading window, you can view the student’s response to the Discussion Question. You can view the main question by clicking the Assessment Title in the upper-left corner. In the center, the response will show the name of the student, posted date, and status.
- To grade a response, enter a point value in the Final Score box in the upper-right corner.
- If you would like to provide comments for the response you can see under the Final Score box, on the right-hand side, will be the Instructor Comments section for the post. These comments are not required to be completed before you publish the grade.
- Once you are ready to publish the grade and move to the next student, select Publish & Next in the upper-right corner.
NOTE As you grade discussion questions, any comments and entered points will be saved automatically.
- To start grading participation, navigate to the Gradebook and select Start Grading to open the List View or click on a participation point value for a student to open the Detailed View.
- On the Detailed View, you will see the total substantive posts that student has made for the week. On the Top of the page will be the students name, the status of the participation, and the Minimum Met? section.
NOTE You may notice the gradebook flagging ungraded participation despite all available students being graded. This is because inactive students are filtered from the gradebook. You will need to filter by inactive students and input grades for those inactive students to remove the notification about ungraded participation. If you are unsure about how to enter grades for these students, contact Faculty Training and Development. - On the top-right corner of the page will be where you can enter the grade value for the student.
- On the right side of the page will be the Instructor Comments section.
- Once the Participation has been graded and you are ready to move on to the next student, select the Publish & Next button in the top-right corner.
NOTE As you grade the participation, any comments and entered points will be saved automatically.
If you want to grade assignments and leave more detailed comments in a more timely manner, then you can use filtered grading.
- To filter the grading list, start by clicking the three-lined icon at the top left of the list-view grading page to open a side-menu.
- Click on the Sort By drop-down menu to see different list ordering options.
- Select the arrowhead icon to open a menu of list filtering options. Choose the grading status, or statuses, of the assignment that you want to grade and then press Apply Filters.
- The student list in the side-menu should immediately be filtered based on the options you selected. Next, you will want to select the first student at the top of the list. This will open the detailed view for that student.
- Once you’re done grading and commenting for the assignment, you can press Publish & Next, or Next, to be transferred to the next student on your filtered list.
NOTE After you have graded every student on the filtered list, if you press Publish & Next, there is a chance your page will get stuck on a loading screen. If this happens, refresh the page.
- To access the List View, select Gradebook from the lefthand side of the Halo classroom.
- Once the Gradebook is open, find the assignment you would like to grade then select Start Grading.
- This will open the List view for the assessment and allow you to grade multiple students at once. On the right-hand side, you can select the filter by tab to filter by assessment status. If you would like to filter the submissions, select the filter and then select Apply Filters.
- You can then select the checkbox on the top-left corner of the list of students. Once selected it will add a check mark into the boxes for all visible submissions. You can also select the checkbox next to any student to select or deselect that specific student.
- Once students have been selected, the Bulk Edit option at the top will appear.
- In the Bulk Edit window, you can set the scores and add a comment to all selected assessments at once. Initially the options will appear greyed out, you will need to click on the toggle to enable editing for this option.
- After adding the score or comments that you want to provide, select Submit.
NOTE Comments and scores will not save until you press submit. - When you are ready to publish the grades, select the Publish Updates button in the top right to publish any assessment that is ready to be published. If you have specific students selected, this option will only publish the selected students’ grades.
NOTE If the assessment has a rubric and has been either submitted on time or is late, the rubric is required before you can publish the updates. For any overdue assessments, rubrics will not be required before publishing.
FAQs
There may be times when a student submits the wrong assignment or doesn’t include all required documents and will need to resubmit the assignment. Before reassigning any assignment, please see the following reminders:
- Participation cannot be reassigned.
- If an assessment has already been reassigned and the student has not yet resubmitted, the assignment cannot be reassigned again.
- Faculty can only reassign assignments for up to three weeks after the course end date. If a student needs to submit an assignment past the first three weeks since the course end date, we recommend reaching out to Faculty Training and Development for guidance.
- Faculty cannot reassign assignments for students with accommodations. The 14-day extension is hard-set in the LMS. If you need guidance on how to grade students with accommodations, we recommend reaching out to Faculty Training and Development.
- Faculty cannot adjust a due date to a sooner due date, only to a later due date.
To reassign any assignment in your course, follow the steps below.
- To reassign an item, select the point value of that assessment for the student from the Gradebook or click Grade Submission from the Worklist.
- In the top-right corner, select the Arrow to the right of the Publish & Next button.
- Once the drop-down is open, select Reassign.
- In the reassignment window, select a due date for the assignment. You can use the original due date or select a new due date. If you do not want to type in the date and time, click the calendar and clock icon to select it instead. Also, if you decide to add an attachment, please remember that the file size limit is 40 megabytes (MB), and Halo only accepts specific file types. For the list of acceptable file types, please refer to the Invalid File Type Error in Halo | Learn article.
NOTE If you have instructor comments on the assessment, you can include them in your reassignment comments by clicking Include Instructor Comments. Reassignment comments are different from instructor comments and can be viewed by looking at the attempt history. - When you are ready, press Reassign.
To view a student’s previous submission, follow the steps below.
- To view the assignment, navigate to the student’s individual submission page.
- To look at the previous submissions, click on Attempt History to open a list of all the attempts for the assignment.
- From here you can click on the attempt you would like to view. You can also use the scroll bar to view the reassignment comments.
There may be times where a student submits the wrong DQ response or submits their response before they’re finished writing it. In cases like this, you can reassign the Discussion Question to the student. Please note:
- If a Discussion Question has already been reassigned and the student has not yet resubmitted, the DQ cannot be reassigned again.
- Faculty can only reassign Discussion Questions for up to three weeks after the course end date. If a student needs to submit a DQ response past the first three weeks since the course end date, we recommend reaching out to Faculty Training and Development for guidance.
- Faculty cannot adjust a due date to a sooner due date, only to a later due date.
To reassign any Discussion Question in your course, follow the steps below.
- To reassign a Discussion Question, select the point value for any student on the DQ in question.
- This will open the grading page for that DQ. In the top-right corner, select the Arrow to the right of the Publish & Next button.
- Once the drop-down is open, select Reassign.
- From the prompt, select the new due date, provide comments on why you are reassigning the DQ and then click Reassign.
NOTE If you decide to add an attachment to your reassignment comments, please remember that the file size limit is 40 megabytes (MB) and Halo only accepts specific file types. For the list of acceptable file types, please refer to the Invalid File Type Error in Halo | Learn article. - The Discussion Question is now reassigned to the student.
There may be times where you published a wrong grade for a student’s assignment. In cases like this, you can change the published assignment grade in the Halo Gradebook. To change the grade for any published assignment, follow the steps bellow.
- To start, select the point value of the assessment from the Gradebook or click Grade Submission from the Worklist.
- In the top corner, adjust the point value for the assessment.
- Once the desired score has been entered, click on Publish & Next button.
- The published assignment grade should be updated to the new published score.
Instructors can mark replies from students as substantive or not substantive. Navigate to the discussion forum and then click the button below the reply text to switch between grey (not substantive) or green (substantive).
In Halo, you can open the gradebook for a specific student from the Gradebook or from the Roster. This will show you what the gradebook looks like from that student's perspective.
From the gradebook, you can view their gradebook by clicking on their name in the left-hand column of the gradebook.
From the roster, you can view their gradebook by clicking on their name in the roster.
A new tab will open with their student-specific gradebook.
As stated in the cautionary text in the preview mode, the formatting might not be consistent with the submitted documents formatting. In this case, we recommend downloading and reviewing the submitted file.
Any course that you teach has a gradebook that can be downloaded and viewed through Excel. In order to do this, simply navigate to the gradebook tab in your Halo course and then near the top of the page there will be a link that says Download Gradebook with a downward facing arrow next to it, click that link.
After clicking the link, a new window will appear with a FERPA related disclaimer. Click the agree button if you agree to be complaint with the notice.
The course gradebook will then download and can be seen in your browser's download manager. Do not open it from there.
Open a new, blank Excel sheet and navigate to the Data tab. Once in the Data tab select the option that says, From text/CSV.
Once selected, a new file explorer window will appear. Navigate to the course gradebook that you downloaded and select it. The file should be in the Download section. Next, select the Open button.
A new window will appear with a preview of the data, select the load button near the bottom right of the window.
The gradebook data would now be loaded in the correct format.
On assessments that require a submission you can download all the submitted files for that assessment. To download the submissions, navigate to the Gradebook.
Locate the assessment with the submissions that you want to download. Select the three dots next to the assessment name and select Download all submissions.
A zip folder will start to download with all the submissions. If the file does not download, this means that the files combined is over 600 mb and you will not be able to download all submissions at once. However, if the files are small in size and the folder is done downloading, use the article How to Zip and Un-Zip Your Files to go through the process of un-zipping the folder.Once you have extracted the files, you can then view all the submitted documents for that assessment.
Knowing the status of an assignment helps to determine what can be graded, and what needs to be graded.
Overdue
This status indicates that there is no submission, and the assignment due date has passed.
Submitted
This status appears for assignments and discussion questions that have been submitted on time and have not been graded yet. For participation, it appears after the topic end date has passed.
Late
When an assignment status is late, this indicates that the submission was received after the due date and the grade has not been published.
Reassigned
After you reassign the assignment, this status appears until the student resubmits again. While the assignment has this status, you cannot grade the assignment again.
Published
This status appears after the assignment has been graded and the grade has been published.
Active
This status appears on all assignments that are active for the topic.
No Status
When an item on the grade book does not have a status, the assignment is not open for submissions and cannot be graded.
In Progress
This is the status that appears when students have started a quiz but hasn’t submitted their answers yet.
The grade count be accessed by starting on the Calendar.
When you select an assignment, a brief overview appears. At the end of the overview, counts for submitted, late, and overdue submissions will appear.
You may receive a message that says, “Error Publishing” or “Please try again”. If you continue to see this error, please contact Technical Support.” When this occurs, it is because an assignment grade for the student was left blank. To resolve this issue, regrade the student’s blank grade with a number value, even if it is a zero as a placeholder.
Within your Halo | Learn gradebook, there is an option to use a calculator to determine how many points a student can lose when submitting a late assignment. To use the Late Calculator, click on Late Calculator.
You’ll be able to see the current score for the student, and how many points will be deducted based off of the University’s Late policy. To apply the updated score, select Update.
Once applied the final score will be updated and a comment will be to the instructor’s comment field explaining the point deduction.
You can provide documents to the student when providing comments on all types of assessments. If you are trying to upload files keep in mind the file size and type of the document.
Halo | Learn has a maximum file size of 40 megabytes (MB) and if your file is too large, you may receive the following error:
To compress the file, check out the article Compressing your File(s) to Upload to Halo | Learn.
Also, Halo | Learn allows a maximum of 10 files to be uploaded and if you try to upload more than 10 files, you may receive the following error:
There are also specific file types that are acceptable to the Halo | Learn classroom. A list of files compatible for Halo | Learn can be found in the article Invalid File Type Error in Halo | Learn. If you try to upload a file that is not compatible, you will receive the error message:
When entering the list view, you may receive the following error message.
This means that another instructor or instructional assistant has made changes to that assessment within the last 10 minutes. Click OK to continue. If you do not want to overwrite the efforts of the other instructor, select Exit Grading View.
Microsoft offers an alternative similarity report generator through Microsoft Word. GCU Faculty can use this feature with the Online version of Word through portal.office.com. This can be used if you ever need to check for plagiarism on an assessment that didn’t require LopesWrite. While this is an alternative to LopesWrite, it should not be substituted for the program. For more information on this Microsoft alternative, please visit support.microsoft.com.
You may experience problems with opening a OneDrive link provided by the student. When trying to access the link, you may receive either an error saying that your account can’t be found in the mygcuedu6961-my.sharepoint.com directory or an Access Denied error.
If you are receiving this error, we recommend reaching out to GCU Technical Support to have the issue escalated.