Review and grade your students’ assignments
Once students complete an assignment, there are a number of different methods to leave feedback and assess their work. Check out these approaches that may fit your teaching style and setup.
Leave comments and feedback inside Benchling
Ensure students always give you “ADMIN” access to Projects related to your course and designate deadlines for completing assignments. Afterwards, directly review your students’ work and add comments using different colored text or highlighting. Once you’re finished, you can @mention that student to notify them by email that you’ve checked their work.
Exporting assignments or lab reports as a PDF
Integrate learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, or Google Classroom with Benchling by having students turn in their assignments digitally. After students complete assignments in the Notebook, they can export each of them as a PDF and upload those files wherever. Having students centralize submissions onto a single platform can help you maintain your grade book easier.
Checking assignments or lab reports for unwanted collaboration
For concerns about academic dishonesty, we recommend instructors to check version histories of files and turn on timestamps for submissions. Copying & pasting tends to leave fewer number of file versions and timestamps will indicate if others contributed to an assignment if they were not allowed to do so. Additionally, it may make sense to consider grading the work done on Benchling mostly for “effort” as opposed to “accuracy”.