Anonymous Grading Options on OWL Brightspace: An Instructor’s Guide

In some specialized courses, maintaining fairness and objectivity in grading is a top priority for instructors. Anonymous grading helps minimize unconscious bias by concealing student identities during assessment evaluation. At Western, instructors currently have two tools with options for anonymous grading available on OWL Brightspace: Gradescope and Brightspace’s built-in anonymous grading tools, including Blind Marking for Quizzes. Here’s an overview to help you decide which best suits your course needs.

Option 1: Anonymous Grading Using Gradescope

Gradescope is a powerful grading platform integrated with OWL Brightspace, especially useful for grading scanned paper-based exams, problem sets, and programming assignments. All assignment types on Gradescope include an anonymous grading option that instructors can enable during assignment setup to grade student submissions without seeing names, ensuring objectivity.

Gradescope Key Features:

• Supports multiple graders and collaborative grading workflows.
• Accepts handwritten submissions and programming code.
• The ability to hide student names during grading.
• Enables rubric-based grading with instant updates to all submissions.

Use Case Examples:

• Handwritten scanned paper-based quizzes, midterms, or finals
• Programming assignments

How to Enable:

• Enable Gradescope through your OWL Brightspace course via the Content tool by clicking on the target unit > Add Existing > Gradescope Assignment.
• During assignment setup, under Submission Anonymization, check the box next to “Enable anonymous grading”.

More Help:

• Gradescope Help: Anonymous Grading
• For more information on adding Gradescope to your OWL Brightspace course, please refer to the FAQ “How do I add Gradescope?” on theOWL Brightspace Help website.

Option 2: Anonymous Grading Using Brightspace Tools (Including Blind Marking)

Brightspace includes anonymous grading features built into the Assignments and Quizzes tools. For Assignments, this is simply called anonymous grading. For Quizzes, the feature is called Blind Marking, which ensures instructors do not see student names while evaluating quiz responses for every manually graded question.

Key Features:

• Assignments: Enable anonymous grading by toggling "Hide student names during assessment"
• Quizzes: Enable Blind Marking in the quiz Grade setup to conceal student identities during manual question evaluation.
• Fully integrated with the Brightspace Gradebook.
• Works with written submissions, file uploads, and manually marked quiz questions.

Use Case Examples:

• Uploaded essay assignments
• Reflections or journals
• Short-answer or written-response quizzes, where each question is graded manually

How to Enable:

• For Assignments: When creating or editing, go to the Evaluation & Feedback section and check the “Hide student names during assessment” box under Anonymous Marking. 

• For Quizzes: After clicking on the Grade drop-down option for the quiz, click on the “Questions” tab, check the “Hide learners’ names” box under Grade individual responses to anonymize student names during quiz grading. 

More Help:

• Brightspace Assignment: Enable/Disable Anonymous Marking
• Brightspace Quizzes: Blind Marking

Recommendations: Which Tool is Right for You?

Need Help?

• Please contact the WTS Helpdesk for support.