Published on: 28/09/2023 · Last updated on: 12/09/2025
Anonymous marking
The University has adopted a principle of anonymous marking to protect students and staff from bias, and the perception of bias, in the marking process. It applies to all assessment where practical. QA16 Assessment, Marking and Feedback details the principles and procedures for the design & development of assessment & feedback strategies for taught courses, including anonymous marking.
Step 1: Mark submitted work
Mark submitted work as usal and see our guides: How to mark an assignment online or How to grade mark an assignment offline and upload feedback.
Step 2: Reveal student names to the marker and return marks to students
To reveal student identities, see our guide on How to lift anonymity in an assignment.
Grades and feedback can now be released without lifting anonymity first. This could be particularly helpful in those cases where not all of the submissions have been marked (e.g. if some students have extensions) but where you don’t want to prevent the rest of the cohort from seeing their marks in a timely manner.
This feature works in conjunction with the ‘Workflow’ setting and (by default) any submissions that have their workflow status set to ‘Released’ will result in the students seeing their feedback and grades. The students displayed on the grading table will remain anonymous until the Teacher lifts anonymity for the cohort.
Moodle anonymous marking FAQ
No. Moodle anonymity is absolute and is applied to the entire cohort equally. As this is the case, owners of specific submissions can only be identified in Moodle once anonymity has been lifted.
We recommend that students put an identifier (such as their student ID or candidate number) into the file name, and the body, of the document they are submitting so that they can be identified if there is a problem. In theory this practice also enables you to identify students who have not submitted their work although the process is time consuming and not normally recommended. Normally the names of students are revealed at the end of the marking process when anonymity is lifted. Reminders to students to submit their work on time should be sent to the whole cohort.
Follow the How to add student extensions for Assignments guidance article.
This number is recorded in the offline grading worksheet. This can be done by visiting the assignment marking interface and, as shown below, selecting Download grading worksheet from the Grading action dropdown menu.
| If you download this at any point after anonymity has been lifted it will show both the student name and the identifier that was used for their submission. |