Run your class in SurveyorSim

1. Open the classroom → Instructor sign-in → Create account. Any email works; passwords need 10+ characters.
2. Confirm your email. We send a link at signup. You can build classes and author sites immediately, but publishing to students is gated on a confirmed address — if the mail hasn't arrived, the classes page has a Resend link button.
3. Create a class — a name and an optional term. Each class gets its own join code and roster.

An assignment is an exercise — differential leveling, closed traverse, chaining, monument recovery, or stakeout — plus your settings. The fastest path is the site library below; the New assignment form is the full-control path. Either way it lands as a draft: students see nothing until you press Publish.

• Assessment = who grades. That is the whole choice. Auto-graded: the computer grades at hand-in and the student sees their score right away. Submission review: the sim records everything and waits for you — open Review on the student and enter the grade there. Auto + submission: the computer grades and you read the record behind it. Completion only: nobody grades — handed in or not is the whole assessment, and Results reads Handed in the moment it lands. On Submission review (and anything the auto-grader declined to score), Results shows Needs review until you enter the grade — that is the product waiting on you, not a fault.
• Tools available to students. The shot log and the calculator are ticks; the data collector is a three-way choice — Not available, Available, or Required. The field book ticks here too, but that box only mirrors the Field book setting below. Use them to make a lab assess what you meant it to: no calculator on a hand-computation lab, no collector when the point is booking by hand. The two ticks reach inside the handheld as well. Untick the calculator and the COGO screen goes with the on-screen one; untick the shot log and the Raw screen goes, together with the RW5 download that is the same file. The Raw screen is more than a list — Process Raw and Compass adjust live on it, and between them they recompute every coordinate and run the closure and compass-rule adjustment of the traverse. Those ride the shot log tick, not the calculator: on a traverse-computation lab untick the shot log as well, or the handheld does the reduction for the student. The Points screen stays either way — it is the list of points the student has stored, and with the Raw screen and the shot log both gone it is the only check on their own work they have left. Staking is untouched by either tick, so a stake-out lab still stakes out. Required shows the student an instruction at the start to record their work in the handheld, and never blocks a hand-in; on an auto-graded assignment it also notes any attempt that handed in no job, where the student does not see it. Withholding is silent on the student's side. An unticked shot log or calculator, and a collector set to Not available, simply leave no button, and the student is told nothing about what you took out. Say so on your handout if they need to know.
• Field book. Pre-filled column headers, blank pages, or guided; the no-erase strike discipline; and for leveling, whether the book is the graded record — leveling auto-grades from the tagged book, and the form warns you live if your combination has no grader.
• Crew mode. Solo, crew, or student's choice. Solo assignments have no multiplayer at all — the option is removed in the sim, not merely discouraged.
• Due dates don't lock anything — late work is accepted and stamped with its real submit time, so late policy stays yours.
• Edit details on the assignment row changes the envelope (title, dates, assessment, tools, book) any time — even after students start. The site freezes once real work exists; that's what Duplicate is for.

On a crew assignment, each crew works as one field party in a shared live session: one student hosts, the others join, and every measurement carries the name of whoever took it. The Crews button on the assignment row is where you form them.

• Auto-assign crews deals the whole unassigned roster at your target size, shows the exact split first, and never leaves anyone alone — 7 students at 3 per crew is 4 + 3, never 3 + 3 + 1. Existing crews are left untouched.
• Name a chief for each crew. The chief hosts the session and their record is the one the crew's grade comes from. You can move the chief at any time — even after hand-in — and nobody loses work.
• Seats. With role swap off, you assign each member observer / rodman / collector and the session seats them; with it on, the crew rotates freely — everyone reads the instrument.
• Sessions are scoped. A crew's room admits only that crew — plus you, from a test run of the assignment. Class-mode sessions admit only your class. A shared room code doesn't let a stranger in.
• Never make crews mandatory for graded work if your network is restrictive: school Wi-Fi sometimes blocks peer connections, so Solo or crew is the resilient setting.

• Auto-graded work scores at hand-in against the server's own regeneration of the site — true coordinates and elevations, never client-asserted numbers. Suspicious submissions carry honest anti-tamper flags rather than silent trust.
• Review on any student opens the attempt drill-down: the rubric line by line, their field book page by page (sketches included, printable), signed millimeter residuals per shot, and the verbatim raw records.
• Entering a grade by hand. Submission review work — and anything the auto-grader declined to score — waits for you: open Review, read the record, and enter the grade right there (Pass or Not yet, a percent, and a note the student sees). Saving releases it — the student sees the grade the next time they open the assignment, and the results table and CSV pick it up at once. Change grade revises it any time; the superseded grade stays in the attempt's audit trail. Grading a crew's record grades the whole crew in one save.
• Re-grade — per attempt, or the whole assignment at once with a preview of exactly whose score would move before anything is written. The machine never re-grades over a grade you entered by hand: the sweep skips those rows and says how many it left alone.
• Grades CSV exports the class's scores in one click for your LMS gradebook.
• Field book branding (paid plan) lives on your classes list: one logo for your whole account, on every student's field book cover in every class — including classes you create later. PNG or JPEG under 85 KB, and make it wide — the cover reserves a banner about 4× wider than tall, so around 1200 × 300 px is ideal. A square logo still works but prints small. A transparent PNG sits best; the cover behind it is cream paper.
• Units. Set the class-wide reporting unit on the class page; any single assignment can pin its own. That choice drives the reported numbers and the grading — it does not reach the student's screen. What their screen shows is decided by the collector job: while a job is open, the job's unit takes over every distance they see, LCD and field book included, whatever their own preference is set to. That is the right way round — one job, one unit — and it is why a foot job cannot be booked in metres by mistake. Their personal preference only applies when no job is open.