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Welcome to Pawtograder - Course Staff Guide

This guide helps you set up and run a course in Pawtograder: creating assignments, grading submissions, answering questions, and tracking grades.

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Finding your way around

The course navigation bar is a single flat row. For an instructor it reads: Manage Assignments · Discussion · Office Hours · Gradebook · Surveys · Polls · Course Settings Everything except Course Settings goes straight to a page. Course Settings is a menu: clicking it opens the menu and the address in your browser does not change. Pick one of its entries: Discord, Enrollments, LMS (LTI) Sync, Feature flags, GitHub Templates, Lab Sections, Flashcard Decks, Discussion Topics, Discussion Engagement, Grading Conflicts, Due Date Extensions, Audit Log, Emailer, Workflow Runs.
Most top-level entries are gated on course feature flags. If your course has Discussion, Office Hours, Gradebook, Surveys, or Polls turned off under Course Settings → Feature flags, that entry is missing from the nav entirely. The Flashcards flag is student-facing only: turning it off takes Flashcards out of the student nav and leaves Course Settings → Flashcard Decks where it is for staff. Instructions elsewhere in this guide assume the relevant module is enabled.

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What graders see

Graders get a smaller navigation set than instructors. A grader has no Gradebook entry at all — neither the staff gradebook nor the student one — and does not see these Course Settings entries: Enrollments, LMS (LTI) Sync, Feature flags, GitHub Templates, Discussion Topics, Due Date Extensions, Audit Log, Emailer, Workflow Runs. A grader does see Manage Assignments, Discussion, Office Hours, Surveys, Polls, and Course Settings → Discord, Lab Sections, Flashcard Decks, Discussion Engagement, and Grading Conflicts.

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Key features

  • Assignments: distribute and grade programming assignments with autograders, rubrics, groups, and bulk grading assignments
  • Discussion: a course discussion board for students and staff, with karma and engagement reporting
  • Office Hours: realtime help queues, by text chat, video call, or in person
  • Gradebook: expression-based grade columns, with an instructor-only export
  • Surveys: SurveyJS-based feedback collection with per-survey response reports
  • Polls: quick in-class polling for comprehension checks
  • Flashcard Decks: practice decks with per-student and per-card analytics
  • Emailer: compose and send email to course members from Course Settings → Emailer
  • Workflow Runs and Audit Log: autograder run health, and a log of changes to assignments, groups, extensions, rubrics, submissions, reviews, comments, and discussion threads
  • Discord and LMS (LTI) Sync: optional integrations for chat and for roster/grade sync

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The course home page

Opening a course as staff gives you a dashboard with these sections:
  • Assignment Grading Overview, with summary cards for Assignments Needing Attention, Incomplete Submission Reviews, Incomplete Review Assignments, Grade Release Status, and Open Regrade Requests
  • Three assignment tables: Needs attention, Upcoming with no blocking work, and Complete or stable
  • Open Office Hours Requests — a list of currently open help requests, shown only when Office Hours is enabled
  • Workflow Runs Summary — autograder run counts and error counts for Last Hour, Last 24 Hours, and Recent Errors
A View as student button in the header shows you the course the way a student sees it. See Instructor Dashboard for what each card and column means.

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Time zones

Each course has a time zone that all due dates, deadlines, and timestamps are interpreted in. It defaults to America/New_York, and nothing in the course UI or the admin portal can change it — if your course’s time zone is wrong, ask your Pawtograder administrator to set it directly. You can choose how times are displayed to you: open the user menu and pick Time Zone Settings, then choose Course time zone or Your local time zone. That preference is saved in your browser only and does not change any deadline. The header also shows the current course time zone as a Course Time Zone button.

Assignments

Create, distribute, and grade programming assignments with autograders and rubrics.

Course Settings

Enrollments, feature flags, lab sections, extensions, and the rest of the settings menu.

Gradebook

Track grades with expression-based calculations.

Office Hours

Run help queues, track TA time, and moderate requests.

Discussion

Moderate the discussion board and review engagement.

Polls

Conduct live in-class polling to check understanding.

Surveys

Collect detailed feedback with customizable survey forms.

AI Assistance

Copy structured prompts into an AI assistant to help diagnose student errors.

Exporting Course Data

Every CSV, JSON, ZIP, and Markdown download available to staff.