I'm interested at looking at MDL-42716 which has caused us some problems.
In a nutshell, the blind marking process means that it is now not possible to do some administrative tasks that require an administrator to know who a particular student is.
At the core of this is the fact that the grade capability is used to manage the access to the grading tools including the submissions list.
The situation we have is that there are academics (who typically hold a "lecturer"/teacher role) and administrative staff.
The academic staff perform that *actual* marking of the submission and this is done (should be done) blindly. The administrative staff however deal with aspects to do with assigning users to graders, attaching extensions to users, and applying modifications to user grades in the case of disability adjustments.
The current set up precludes this, so I'm proposing that:
- Separate grade capability into the existing "mod/assign:grade" capability and an "mod/assign:manage grades" capability.
- The "mod/assign:managegrades" capability would enable the same features and functions as the "mod/assign:grade" *and* disable the blind marking.
- Modify mod_assign to accommodate the display of user's details *even* if blind marking is enabled.
Of course introducing this means that it is possible to have a grader who can see the real identities, so I'm suggesting that the code should establish a precedence order in that"mod/assign:grade" capability "trumps" the the "mod/assign:managegrades" capability if a user is holding *both*.
If a user only holds 1 of these capabilities then the appropriate display of user details is presented.
In the case where a user does need to grade "blind" but also perform administrative tasks in a non-blind manner, then the "switch roles" feature of moodle could be used to change to an administrative role which has the "managegrades" capability.
The default setting for the "mod/assign:managegrades" capability would default to *not set* so that it must be explicitly configured to enable this behaviour, but allows the current configuration to remain.
Comments/thoughts....
(Edinburgh hack fest is tomorrow so I was thinking of spending some time looking at this)