Blind marking (2024)

• Recipe Link

This guide details how to enable blind marking for the Moodle Assignment activity and what it means.

If you were planning on using blind marking for quizzes, this is unfortunately not possible. Consider using the Quiz activity for question types which allow automatic marking, such as multiple-choice questions. You can then combine that with an Assignment activity where you can ask essay or short answer questions.

Blind marking is a feature of Moodle assignments that, when enabled, allows for submissions to be marked without personally identifiable information being visible to the marker. Instead of student names, you will see randomly generated participant numbers. Only users with the Manager role will still be able to see personally identifiable information. Using blind marking can improve fairness and equal treatment of students in the assessment process.

Let students know that the assessment is blind marked and that they should not include any personally identifying information in the submission itself or its metadata (e.g name of the file). You can do so in the description of the assignment.

Enable blind marking for an assignment

Blind marking cannot be enabled once submissions have been made. It must be enabled during the Assignment setup or before the first student submits.

If you are new to Moodle assignments and you haven't yet created one for which you want to enable blind marking, you might first want to have a look at the overview page on Assessment and Feedback which also links to other assessment guides.

1. Turn editing on.
2. Click on the gear icon of the assignment for which you want to enable blind marking.
3. Click Edit settings in the drop-down list.
4. In the Grade section, for Blind marking select Yes from the drop-down list.
5. Click Save and display.

Reveal identities on the assignment grading page

Once you have completed marking, you must reveal the student identities in order for students to see their final grade, or advanced grading features such as rubrics. Note that if you are using the marking workflow feature as well, students will not be able to view feedback until it has been released AND the student identities are revealed.

Once student identities are revealed you cannot go back to the blind marking mode.

1. Click on the assignment activity for which you want to reveal student identities to teaching staff.
2. Click on View all submissions.
3. Select Reveal student identities from the Grading action drop-down.
4. Click Continue to confirm that you want to reveal students' personal information on the assignment grading page.

For information on how to hide or show grades and feedback to students please follow the Hide or show feedback to students guide.

The information on this page relates to Moodle v3.6 and was last updated April 2020.