Assignment 2.1 Premium Updates

It’s not an exaggeration to say that today’s three PressPrimer Assignment plugin updates push our suite of assignment workflow tools far beyond anything else available in WordPress. Every plugin in the Assignment suite gains significant new features that make WordPress a viable platform for enterprise-level assignment management. The Educator add-on gains better reporting and data management, School adds in-browser assignment markup and xAPI support, and Enterprise introduces anonymous grading and plagiarism plus AI detection.

If you have an active license to the PressPrimer Assignment premium plugins, the updates will be available on your WordPress site. If you’re new to PressPrimer Assignment, you can see available plans on the pricing page.

Here’s what’s new in the 2.1 releases.

Group reports (Educator)

Assignments needed better group reporting, and we delivered. There are two new reports available under Assignments > Reports: Group Completion and Per-Criteria Grade Breakdown.

The new Group Completion report pulls together everything you need to answer, “How is this group doing?”. There are stat cards about membership, scores, and lateness. Then there are charts for status and scores for graded submissions. And beneath the charts, there’s a breakdown of all group members and their submission status for every assignment. Click on any student row to see a complete breakdown of their performance, including average score, lateness, submission history, and score trend.

For instructors using the rubric builder, the Per-Criteria Breakdown helps to identify which criteria students are struggling with. On load, you’ll get a chart showing how a group (or all users, if the person viewing the report is an admin) performed across all categories, from worst-performing to best. Then, if you use performance levels for your rubrics, you can click on any bar in the chart to get a detailed view of performance level breakdowns for that rubric category. It’s a great way to see where students in a group are struggling.

Data cleanup tools (Educator)

The Educator 2.1 release adds a new suite of manual and automated cleanup tools. After all, file-based assignments can use up storage quickly, and not all records need to be retained indefinitely. Here’s what’s included:

• An Orphan Finder, to locate database records where the files might have been deleted or submissions were started but never sent for grading.
• A Storage Scanner, which cleans up files without associated database records, like cancelled uploads.
• A Predecessor Cleanup, where students have submitted new entries when retakes are allowed and earlier submissions are no longer needed.
• An Old Attachments Cleanup, where files older than a certain date are deleted, but grades and feedback are retained.

All of the above can be run on demand or on a schedule, and there’s a “dry run” tool to simulate the cleanup so you can see exactly what will happen before you commit to the real cleanup.

Inline annotations (School)

This feature is absolutely huge—and it took us a lot of work to get it just right (and working with all assignment formats). Now, right from the grading interface, instructors can mark up student submissions with comments, underlines, text highlights, and even freehand drawings. That’s right, when someone uploads a PDF, you can add your comments, circle things, and really do whatever you want, right on top of the PDF file in your browser. And students see all annotations exactly as you made them in the front end.

Annotations are stored separately and added as a layer on top of the original, so the source files are never modified. Downloads are always of the original file; annotations are only shown in the browser to students and instructors. The new system works for all file types, including images, PDFs, Word documents, TXT, etc. It also works with the built-in text editor. Annotation support is optional and must be enabled at the assignment level to use it for grading.

xAPI support (School)

For organizations running compliance training programs or centralizing their training records, School adds full xAPI support. The system captures assignment activity related to submissions, grading, and pass/fail outcomes. It’s also extremely reliable and works in the background; we borrowed the same queuing and retry system that’s already in place for PressPrimer Quiz School.

Anonymous Grading (Enterprise)

Instructor bias when grading is real, and the new switch to enable anonymous grading helps to keep grades more neutral and consistent. When enabled, instructors cannot see any identifiable information associated with the student who submitted an assignment. Even file names for uploads are masked, so instructors can only judge submissions based on their merit and not anything related to the student.

The system masks records during the grading process, but all internal records remain linked to the student. And once a submission has been graded and returned, the student identity and other details are fully unmasked again.

AI Content and Plagiarism Detection (Enterprise)

This is another huge feature that’s unique in the WordPress ecosystem. When the Enterprise plugin is active, and you have connected a GPTZero, Winston, or Originality.ai API key to PressPrimer Assignment, student submissions can be manually or automatically checked for AI content and plagiarism.

The system runs asynchronously in the background, so students never have to wait on a check. The results of the check don’t affect grades, but serve as an informational aid to instructors about how to proceed when cheating is detected. The results render in the grading interface so users can see the results and make decisions accordingly as they grade.

There’s also a new Plagiarism Report under Assignments > Reports. The report has stat cards, an AI-likelihood distribution chart, and originality scores. Here are a couple of quick notes to keep in mind:

• You must have an active subscription to GPTZero, Winston or Originality.ai to use these features. You can click here to sign up for GPTZero, here for Winston AI, and here to sign up for Originality.ai.
• When enabled, student submissions are sent to those platforms, so keep that in mind for your privacy policies. (No records are ever sent to PressPrimer.)
• The system only works for text documents with more than 50 characters of text. Anything shorter, or image files, are skipped.

Get the updates

The new premium plugins are available now. If you’re a current customer, you can find the downloads in your account or you can update on your website. If you’re not yet a premium user, now is the best time to buy; our launch sale is still running but wraps up next week. Prices will increase next month.

Let us know how you’re enjoying the new features in the comments below!