Moodle - Assignment Grading With Marking Workflow (staff/faculty)

Moodle marking workflow, a feature of the Assignment activity, enables you to add grades and feedback to student submissions and release (show) the grades and feedback to all students at the same time. Marking workflow will also prevent any grading/feedback notifications from being sent to students if marking workflow is not set to released. Use marking workflow if you are marking assignments over several days and would like all students to see their grades/feedback at the same time.

Marking workflow does a lot more than allow the release of grades/feedback at the same time, but these instructions will only cover these aspects of marking workflow. For more information on the additional capabilities of marking workflow, refer to the official Moodle documentation.

The main steps to using marking workflow are:

Enable marking workflow in the assignment activity (if it's not already).
Grade submissions and provide feedback as usual
Set marking workflow state to released, which will make the grades and feedback available to students

Note: When marking workflow is enabled and grades have been entered, turning it off does not automatically release the grades. It does not need to be turned off but if you want to turn off marking workflow you need to release the grades and then turn it off.

Steps

1. Enable marking workflow in the assignment activity

To use marking workflow, you must first enable it for the Assignment.

Navigate to the assignment, select Settings at the top, scroll down and expand Grade, set Use marking workflow to Yes, and select Save and Display at the bottom.

Now that you've enabled marking workflow, students will not see their grades/feedback until you release it to them.

2. Grade submissions and provide feedback as usual

Grade student submissions, providing grades and feedback.

Instructions on Moodle assignment grading may be found here, and if you're new to grading in Moodle then start with the 'online grading' grading workflow.

While grading, depending on how you grade, you will likely see an option to set the marking state. It will default to Not marked. You can leave it at the default or you can set it to another state if you'd like as long as you do not set it to Released.
* All states will hide the grades and feedback from the student except for Released so it is optional to use the other states.

Once you've finished grading the assignment, continue to the next step below to release (show) the grades to the students.

3. Set marking workflow state to released

Once you're ready to release the grades/feedback to students, navigate to the assignment and select Submissions.

There are a couple of ways to release the grades.

a. Select students one by one:

In the drop down menu for each student, select Released. Do this for one or multiple students.
Then in the bottom toolbar, click Save.

b. Or, select ALL students (preferred method):

You'll usually want to release all student grades at once and here's how. At the top left of the table, select the checkbox to select all students.

The bottom toolbar will change. Click the 3 dots for More, select Change marking state from the menu.

Confirm by selecting Change marking state.

You may see a warning like this or one that is similar. If so, select Leave (you're not losing any changes).

Set the Marking workflow state to Released and select Save changes. Optionally, you may choose to notify students which will send them an email notification.

If you return to the submissions table you should see the marking workflow status of each student is now set to Released.

Once the marking workflow state is set to Released, students will be able to see their grades and feedback for the assignment.

Troubleshooting

Grades have been entered but the grades are not showing in the gradebook:
- In the assignment, under Submissions, check to see if it shows "Released" in the Status column for each student (as seen in the last screenshot above).
- If you don't see the drop down menus to choose a workflow state, check the assignment settings and see if Marking Workflow is enabled and turned on in the settings (see step 1 above). You may need to re-save and release the grades again. Then check the gradebook for grades again.