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Poll Visualizations

A poll’s results page shows one thing: a horizontal bar chart of how many responses each choice received, updating as students answer. This page covers how to read it, how to share the link, and how to project it. Open it by clicking a poll’s question on Manage Polls, or by choosing View Poll from the row actions menu.

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The results page

Poll results page with a horizontal bar chart, the Answer at link, a QR code, and Stop Poll and Present buttons
The page has two parts. The header holds, from left to right: Below the header, a panel shows the question prompt as a heading and the bar chart under it, captioned Number of Responses.
The chart is the only view of the data. There is no response table, no respondent names, no total-responses figure, no percentages, and no CSV export.

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Reading the bar chart

  • One bar per choice, labeled with the choice text down the left edge
  • Bar length is the number of responses for that choice
  • All bars share one color. Bar color carries no meaning
  • Counts are read off the horizontal axis, which uses whole numbers only. Hovering a bar shows its exact count as Responses
For a Multiple Choice poll, a single student can add to several bars at once, so the bars can sum to more than the number of students who answered. Since the page never shows a total, there is no reliable way to read participation off the chart.
A choice with zero responses still renders as a labeled bar of zero length, and an answer that does not exactly match one of your choice labels is not counted at all. If a bar stays empty when you expect responses, check the choice labels in the poll’s JSON. See Poll Types for the counting rules.
If the poll’s payload cannot be parsed, the panel shows Unable to display poll with the parse error. If the question type is anything other than Multiple Choice or Single Choice, it shows Unsupported poll question type: followed by the type.

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Live updates

New responses appear without a page refresh, and the affected bar grows immediately. Every staff member with the page open sees the same updates.
Live updates cover new responses only. A deleted or edited response does not decrement a chart that is already open, so reload the page if the underlying data changed some other way.
The link is https://<your-pawtograder-host>/poll/<course_id>, and it is per course rather than per poll.
Every poll in a course shares this one link, and it always opens the poll that was opened most recently. With two polls open at once, students reach only the newer one, so keep one poll open at a time. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.
The QR code encodes that same URL:
  • Click the thumbnail to open the code large enough to project
  • The code is drawn in the browser and follows your light or dark theme, rendering light-on-dark in dark mode. There is no download button, so project it or screenshot it
  • If the poll has Require login to respond checked, students who scan it are sent through sign-in first

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Presentation mode

Present puts the chart panel into browser fullscreen. The header stays behind, so Start Poll, Stop Poll, and ← Back to Polls are unavailable while presenting. While presenting:
  • The chart and question fill the screen
  • Answer at: and a larger QR code sit in the bottom-right corner
  • Responses keep updating live
  • The background follows your current theme, so switch to dark mode before projecting in a dark room
To leave, press Escape or click the close button in the top-right corner. Leaving fullscreen by any other means also exits presentation mode.
Enter presentation mode while students are still answering. Watching the bars move is what makes the poll worth projecting, and the same view works for discussing the final split after you stop the poll.

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Starting and stopping from this page

The single toggle button reflects the poll’s state:
  • Start Poll opens a closed poll so students can answer
  • Stop Poll closes it, keeping the existing responses and the chart viewable
The button is disabled until the poll record finishes loading. The row actions menu on Manage Polls does the same job under different labels, Open Poll and Close Poll.

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Tips for projecting

  • Test the QR code from the back of the room before class
  • Have the URL as a backup, since it is plain text you can read aloud
  • Keep choice labels short, because long labels wrap onto several lines in the narrow axis gutter
  • Screenshot the chart if you want a record. Nothing here exports, and deleting the poll deletes its responses

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Accessibility

  • Every choice is labeled as text beside its bar, not by color
  • Counts are available from the numeric axis and from the per-bar tooltip
  • The Answer at: URL is a text alternative to the QR code for students whose camera scanning fails