In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily.

Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting funny, and I wasn’t sure the buttons I was pushing were being recognized. The interface looked something like this, with buttons partly obscured:

I clicked what I thought was the cancel button (see a normal-looking screen shot, showing the panel in a normal condition)

…but it looks like in whatever mode I was in, the place where the “Cancel” button is overlaps perfectly with the “Delete Set” button (upper right, image below), which does not have a confirmation. So with one click, I totally erased a set of comments I had been building for years. I didn’t intend to click the delete button — I was trying to cancel, but the interface was screwed up. It’s very bad user interface practice to let a user delete something with one click, without a conformation box.

I am fairly confident that Turnitin.com will be able to restore that set for me from a backup, but it does mean that I’ll have to grade my current set of papers without the benefit of my carefully-curated set of comments. Deeply, deeply frustrating.