Grading with Perusall

This article is intended for instructors looking to understand and use the Perusall grading system.

Grading Model

Perusall features a scoring template for Standard and Differentiated Assignments.

Instructors can edit the template to ensure that it closely aligns with their assessment style and learning objectives, then customize the option below to best suit their specific needs.

There are seven scoring metrics of student engagement in Perusall, each worth 0 to 100 percent. If a category is set to 0, that will exclude it from counting towards a student's grade. A score is assessed for each category and the sum of these scores is computed into the student’s grade. By default, any score over 100 is a perfect score on the given assignment. By default, assignments are scored from 0 to 3, so if the raw sum of a student's score is 50, they would receive 1.5/3 points on the assignment.

Editing Grading Settings

Editing Course Scoring Settings

Navigate to your Perusall Course.
Click Settings, and then click the Scoring tab.
You will now see the general settings used in the course.

Editing Scoring Templates

From the settings menu, select Scoring templates.
To adjust the default Scoring templates, click on the three dots, then Edit.
Alternatively, instructors can create a new scoring template by click +Create new scoring template, then selecting the appropriate template for their assignment.

Editing Assignment Specific Scoring Templates

Navigate to the Assignments tab from within your Perusall course page.
Select the assignment that you wish to edit. A menu for the specific assignment will appear on the right.
From this menu, instructors can change and edit various settings and details pertaining to the assignment. To edit the assignment’s template, click Edit.
From the pop-up window, select Edit from ‘Scoring template for this assignment’
On the new window, instructors can edit each grading component for the specific assignment.

Grading Components

Perusall contains a Standard/Differentiated Assignment default rubric that grades students on a multitude of ways. Based on this approach, students have the opportunity to earn full credit in seven ways.

Default Target is 60% for submitting 4 high-quality comments.
Students earn full credit on this metric by submitting the required number of comments.
How to award credit: Credit is given for each quality level. If the box for Quality-based scoring is checked, then the score is computed as a fraction of the credit earned over the maximum possible score. If box is checked for Participation-based scoring, then full credit is provided for any comment.
Ensuring comments are distributed evenly throughout the content: Credit is deducted if a student comments multiple times within the same area of content.
Post-deadline reply window: Determines if students can submit replies (not original comments) after the assignment deadline has passed for credit.
Late comment period: The time after the deadline has passed when the submission can be made for partial credit.

Default target is 20% for opening the assignment 3 times.
Students earn full credit for the metric for each time they open the assignment before the deadline.

Default target is 20%
Students receive credit for this metric based on the amount of content that is viewed. When each page of the document is viewed, an entire video or podcast is watched/listened to, the student is awarded with full credit.

Default target time is set to 10% for 45 minutes of engagement.
Students receive credit for this component for each minute they spend activity engaging with the assignment. Active engagement credit is rewarded to the student for every movement made on the assignment within a 2-minute time period. Movement included mouse movement and keypress.

Default target is set to 20% for a post that elicits 5 responses from peers.
Students receive credit when a comment is made on their post by a classmate.

Default target is set to 20% for 5 providing upvotes and for receiving 5 upvotes by their classmates.
Students earn credit each time they upvote a comment and for each time another peer upvotes their comment.

Default target is set to 20%
Students receive credit for responding to each quiz question. Quiz settings are used to determine whether the correct responses are required to receive credit.

Instructors can enable a threshold score for credit on Perusall assignments.

For more information or assistance, contact Educational Technologies at edtech@uconn.edu or by phone at (860) 486-5052.