How does MATLAB Grader and Online Courses handle late submissions in an LMS?

If you are using the LMS integrations for MATLAB Grader or Online Courses, you may find that it is possible for learners to submit a solution or get progress in a course after the due date as listed in your LMS. For example, a deadline is applied to the OTS assignment but it is still possible for students to continue in the MATLAB Academy view, and have their new grades be populated in their LMS gradebook. This means students get to work on the assignment after the deadline has passed.

What you may have tried:

• Created an assignment for MATLAB Onramp
• Had a student complete part of it
• Confirmed the grades were populated
• After the deadline had past, I checked that the student didn’t have access to the course via their LMS
• We then tried completing more of the MATLAB onramp (after the deadline had past) through MATLAB Academy
• Upon checking the LMS gradebook, a new grade was populated for that student (higher mark)
• I then added a restriction to the assignment (not available after a particular date and time)
• We verified that the student could not access the course via their LMS
• Unfortunately, they could still access and further complete the course outside of the LMS, and have a new (higher) grade populate in their LMS gradebook

Answer 1

[Jeff Alderson]

Let me clarify here how the tools is working as expected, and how you can use the LMS effectively in combination with our integration to track and respond to late assignments. If you feel more information is needed, please respond here or contact Customer Support.

Technically, the only way for an assignment in an LMS to reject or flag updated grades (reflecting progress made in Online Courses outside of the LMS) is to implement a policy for late markings for that assignment. Each LMS handles that differently. Additionally, the instructor should set clear policy and expectations with students about how late submissions will be handled. They should tell learners what will happen for late submission in terms of docking points or zeroing out the score entirely. It sounds like your instructor may already have that policy clearly stated this in their course syllabus.

Once the LMS gradebook has been configured to flag submissions after a due date as late, the instructor can simply look at the detailed gradebook history. Instructors can see the date/timestamps of each learner submission. If a submission appears to have been entered late, it can be automatically flagged, or the instructor can manually rescore it to ZERO. For an example in Blackboard, see here: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Original/Grade/Grade_History. For an example in Moodle, see here: https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Assignment_settings#Availability

We also can’t restrict a learner from continuing their Online Courses on our site for their own self paced learning. Many learners will continue in their MathWorks courses even when not assigned by an instructor, and some learners are asked to complete the same Onramp by multiple instructors..

The point here is that the instructor should treat late submissions according to their policy, and just like any other assignment. MATLAB Grader and Online Courses will both send the score and date of update/submission to the gradebook. What the instructor decides to do with it is totally up to them. And since different customers will have different policies it is up to them to implement those policies in the LMS gradebook. Our role is to simply tell the LMS that a grade event occurred – what they do with it is entirely up to their policy.