Category: What Can Moodle Do.
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Marking guides are very easy to setup and use and in many cases can speed up marking, but their strength is not in making life easy or faster in many cases, their strength is in being able to give individual permanent feedback to every student. Educationally this has many advantages for the students learning.

The marking guides can be set so the student can view them in their own profile and therefore can have a clear view of what the teacher is trying to achieve.

As with a lot of feedback similar things are said to many students with occasionally editing to be more specific to the students needs or understanding. This speeds up the process considerably.

To set up simply add an assignment to your course and in the 'Edit settings' Where you see 'Grades' change it from simple grading to grading guide. If you save and view assignment the window to set up the guide appears automatically.

If not select the assignment and once it has opened select settings from the editing menu and then select 'Advanced grading' and then 'Define marking guide'.

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 Assignment Menu

Proceed to set up the marking guide. As with everything on a computer editing is easier than creating so your marking guides can be saved as templates.

This took about 35 minutes to get what I wanted but after being set up it allowed for thoughtful feed back for all student's. Another advantage is that all marks automatically added the students grade books with appropriate loadings and could be downloaded in several different formats including Excel, Open Document Spread sheets, Plain Text files, and XML files. All of which can be opened in any computer including Macs. 

Students can view their scores immediately the teacher pushes the save button so students don't have to wait on a teacher visit or till the following class.

Why don't I write on the papers and give them back to the students?

We are supposed to keep the exams for about 4 months so even giving the students their papers they can only have them for a short time. If your students are like mine they lose their papers in the first hour after they have received them (a little harsh I suppose). The feed back can be revisited at any time by students or teachers if they want to do more work on the issues as now there is a permanent record for referral. The LMS can be set up so parents can view their children's work and the teacher feedback regardless of the student loosing their work or electing not to show their parent. And you are a normal teacher I feel sure at sometime while marking an assignment the thought will occur, 'this feels like deja-vu, I am sure this is what I told him 3 months ago'. Now you have a record and can check.