TRANSCRIPT: Blind Grading in Sakai Assignments

Blind grading students’ work provides an opportunity to help minimize the potential for 
grading bias. In the Assignments tool in Sakai, the blind grading feature is called Anonymous 
grading, and Sakai gives you control over when Anonymous grading is active for an Assignment. 
This allows you to blind grade during your initial review of your students’ submissions, and 
then when you want to follow-up to provide your students with more individualized feedback or 
summary remarks, you can deactivate Anonymous grading.

In this video, we’ll activate Anonymous grading for an existing Sakai Assignment and take a 
look at how the anonymized student submissions appear, and then we’ll deactivate Anonymous 
grading.

To activate Anonymous grading for an assignment, go to Assignments. You can activate this 
feature for any new or existing assignment, including assignments that already have student 
submissions. I’m ready to grade this assignment, and when I click the submissions in the 
In/New column, the students’ submissions appear in alphabetical order. I’d like to blind 
grade during my initial review of their submissions, so we’ll activate Anonymous grading for 
this Assignment. 

Click Assignments to go back to the list of Assignments, and then we’ll locate the Assignment 
and click Edit. Scroll all the way down to nearly the bottom of the page. Anonymous grading 
appears under the Grading Rubric section. We’ll check its box, and then click the Post 
button.

Sakai takes us back to the list of Assignments. Let’s take a look at how the student 
submissions now appear. Just like earlier, I’ll click the submissions in the In/New column, 
and now all of the submissions are anonymized and appearing in random order.

Just click a submission to start blind grading. 

One thing to keep in mind: If the assignment involves students submitting papers with their 
names on them – for example, following MLA or APA format – you'll need to tell students in 
advance not to put their names on their papers if you plan to use blind grading.

When you’re done blind grading, you can deactivate Anonymous grading to provide 
individualized feedback, such as comments on a student’s progress developing a skill or 
application of previous feedback. To deactivate Anonymous grading, we’ll return to the list 
of Assignments, and Edit the Assignment we blind graded.

We’ll scroll down to Anonymous grading, and uncheck its box. Make sure to click the Post 
button and Sakai brings you back to the list of Assignments. Now when you click on the 
submissions, the students’ names again appear in alphabetical order.

Okay! I think you’re ready to give Anonymous grading in Sakai Assignments a try!

If you need any assistance using Sakai, please contact sakaihelp@durhamtech.edu.