Understanding Batch Sheets

How do I know what date and time an assignment was submitted?

How can I quickly determine those students with late submissions?

With every batch delivered or picked up from Assignment Minder, you should receive a batch sheet. An electronic format of this sheet is also e-mailed to you upon completion of a batch being processed for delivery/pick-up. This sheet is a useful tool to assist you in marking assignments in that you can use it to determine the date and time that the assignment was submitted.

Below is a mock batch sheet.

The ‘Submitted’ and ‘Time’ columns show the date and time that each assignment was submitted.
On the coversheet of the assignment you may notice a date and time of a declaration acceptance (as shown below). It is very important that you do not accept the declaration date as the submission date as it is only an indication of the date the coversheet was generated, not the submission time and date.

We print batch sheets in order of the date and time submitted. This means that the first student on the batch sheet was the first to submit, the last student is the latest submission we have batched. Because it is in date order, it is easy to determine which students submitted late. Using the mock batch sheet above as an example, if the assessment piece was due on 04/06/06, the first students submitted before or on the due date. The last two students on the list submitted much later than the due date.

The only exceptions to this method are those assignments which have a received stamp on the coversheet. These are assignments which are submitted at the Assignment Minder desk between 9:45pm and 10:00pm. The Assignment Minder server shuts down at 9:45pm however students may continue to submit assignments until 10:00pm when the desk physically closes. In such cases we stamp the coversheet with the received stamp and sign underneath. The assignment is then scanned into the system on the following morning and as such it will appear on the batch sheet at a date and time later than it was submitted.
Assignment Minder is currently producing an extension to our software that will prevent this particular problem.

Please note: that we are able to print batch sheets in alphabetical order (surname) as well as in order of time submitted. If you would prefer your batch sheets printed this way, please make a note of this on the unit coordinator submission form for your subject.

I only received 3 assignments in a delivery but the accompanying batch sheet had 65 names. Where are the rest of the assignments?

Currently, the software that we use at Assignment Minder can only create one batch sheet for each assessment piece. For example, if you have two assessment pieces, a take home exam and a written essay, there can only be two batch sheets, one for the exam, the other for the essay.
After the initial inflow of submissions on the due date, we manually batch the assignments to the correct assessment piece. At the end of this process a batch sheet for that assessment piece is created, listing all the assignments included in that first batch. The assignments are then delivered, along with the first copy of the batch sheet.
As late submissions continue to trickle in, we add them to the batch for that assessment piece. As we do this, the details of the late submissions are added on to the batch sheet. When this lot of late assignments is delivered to you, a new batch sheet, listing the previously delivered assignments as well as the current delivery are listed.

My batch sheet had the same student listed twice on different dates. Why? How can I tell which assignment folder was submitted on which date?

The first column of the batch sheet, Ass No shows the unique identifying number that is created and associated to the assignment when a student creates a cover sheet.

• If a student submits before the due time/date but later realises a piece of the assessment (a disk, criteria sheet, form, doctor‘s certificate or extension permission slip) is missing we do not allow them to add the missing part to the submitted folder. We usually recommend that they do a second submission folder containing the missing part.
• A student may complete a portion of the assignment and want to submit that portion on/before the due date and submit the whole, completed assignment at a later date as a second submission.
• Often students submitting thesis are required to submit a number of copies. Some students separate these copies into a number of folders, each with a unique coversheet.
• A student may have recorded the incorrect assessment piece details on the assignment coversheet. Unaware of any error, the Assignment Minder staff batch it to the wrong assessment piece accordingly.
• Where a large folio sized assessment piece is submitted, the student may submit a smaller A4 folder containing supporting documents. Both portions are treated by Assignment Minder as separate submissions to the same assessment piece.
• A student may have chosen/been asked to resubmit for the assessment piece. This should be done under a new assignment number and would show as a new entry on the batch sheet.

Other Details

Please note that when a group assignment is submitted, the batch sheet shows only the student name which appears at the top of the coversheet, never the other students’ names manually entered into the group members box below.
The ‘Status’ column will show whether the assignment has been batched to a marker, returned to Assignment Minder from the marker or collected by the student.
The ‘Ret No’ column is the return number of the assignment. This is a second unique identifying number that is stamped on assignments as they are returned in the Assignment Minder computer system to assist us in returning the assignment to the student. This number is not relevant for markers or students.