Depending on your class size, instructional support, and pedagogical goals for using Poll Everywhere in your class, you have three options for viewing and potentially grading student responses.
- View Student Responses in Poll Everywhere Reports. This is a good option if you are not grading student responses, as well as for viewing responses to anonymous activities. You can use the Report function in Poll Everywhere to see responses as a whole, or see responses provided by each student. This allows you to see if there is anything that might be useful for you to address to the class, either in person or via email/Canvas Announcement. (More information below.)
- Export Grades to the Canvas Gradebook. We recommend this option if you want to grade student responses for correctness and/or determine whether or not they have responded to your activities. This will allow you to export grades or participation data from Poll Everywhere into your Canvas gradebook, so you do not need to calculate or enter grades manually. The export feature will create a Canvas Assignment and export the grade total for all of the activities on a 100 point scale (i.e. if you export a report for five activities, each activity will be worth 20 points). (Read more about exporting grades to the Canvas Gradebook.)
- Manually Grade in Canvas. If you have a particular way of grading student responses (including giving any grade above 80% full credit or wanting to manually grade question types that cannot be automatically graded within Poll Everywhere) that does not map onto the Poll Everywhere export function, you may want to manually grade student responses. (More information below.)
If none of these options seem like a good fit for what you want to do, please reach out to the CTE at centerforteaching@bc.edu and we can explore alternatives.
Reports: Viewing Student Responses in Poll Everywhere
If you want to view student responses within the Poll Everywhere website, rather than exporting to the Canvas Gradebook, you can use the Report function. You can generate a report of your students’ responses to see who responded to your activities and what their responses were. You can also see students’ scores for the two question types that allow instructors to designate a correct answer: multiple choice and clickable image. When creating a report, you can decide which activities you want to generate a report for. Some instructors create a report for each class in which students respond to activities. Others will run a report weekly or monthly, to see how students are doing.
Poll Everywhere has comprehensive documentation on reporting, including how to create a report, report types that are available to you, and how to download a report.
If you are using Poll Everywhere Reports to manually grade student responses, or to check for general participation, you can use the Gradebook report type. This will allow you to see the total grade for each student across all activities as well as the student’s participation (i.e. whether or not they have responded to the activities, regardless of correctness).
Manually Entering Student Grades
If the export to the Canvas Gradebook does not fit your needs, and especially for smaller class sizes or classes with TA support, you may want to manually grade student responses. As is the case when exporting grades, your students need to be logged into Poll Everywhere when they respond to activities, and grading for correctness (rather than just participation) only works for question types that have a correct answer (multiple choice and clickable image) and where a correct answer has been indicated by the instructor.
The Poll Everywhere page on grading or scoring responses shows how to set an answer as correct when creating an activity or add a correct answer after the fact.
The most straightforward way to manually enter Poll Everywhere grades in Canvas is to create a report— the “Gradebook” report type provides an average grade for each student as well as the student’s average participation grade, but there are other report types— and then open the Canvas Gradebook and enter the grades.