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Tools for Automated Grading?
Dont tempt me asks: "As all teachers and students are well aware, it is back to school time. As a math/computer teacher, I am constantly looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks. The one that seems to take up most of my time is grading. As is typical for us nerds, I find myself looking at handwritten tests and thinking 'there's gotta be a better way...' Since I can't find any related open-source projects, I have been thinking about creating one. I have been toying with the idea of using OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) to make my own scannable multiple choice tests. Is anyone doing this? If not, where would be a good place to start? In addition to teachers, this could be a useful technology for questionnaires, or other processes that require manual data entry."
Autodata ExpertScan does this already. I've used it for surveys and forms, it should work for a test too, but admittedly, I've not tried it for that.
Everyone I know uses scantron for multiple choice tests. If you're looking for some slightly more tech oriented solutions, here are some suggestions:
For multiple choice tests you could use off the shelf survey software like phpsurveyor or phpesp. Keep in mind these wouldn't necessarily be great at grading but it would let you easily analyze the test results question by question.
If you are grading programming assignments, you could develop your own testing suites using the *unit family of testing suites: nunit (.net), junit (java), phpunit (php), and I'm sure there are others. I think there's even some tools designed to evaluate test coverage like jcoverage (never used). Maybe you could have advanced students write test suites for the novice student assignments and evaluate/fix them with jcoverage... then use the test suites to automate testing of novice students.
Of course, there are only so many things that are easy to test in an automated fashion. You may have to give students exact specifications on interfaces and that may not always be desirable.
I'm a highschool math / science teacher and for a while I've been playing around with moodle (http://moodle.org/). Though it may take a little to setup (PHP and MySQL are needed), it is a good system. Just make sure you have the power to use it.
All in all, it will allow you to make quizzes and lessons online that students can access. Questions can be auto sorted and even short answer questions with different possible answers. Its a beautiful system with the only flaw of facilitating a computer for each student to use. (I'm in an independant school so our kids have laptops at the ready, something we don't all have.)
The only other geek-oriented possiblity would be using scantrons or small LCD based devices, but from what I've seen nothing fits the bill. Possibly the best action might be changing how you grade and what work your students do (ie projects instead of tests and the similar). It works with a little imagination and there's alot less grading!
Besides concerns about cheating, that practice is likely a violation of the student's right to privacy. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the release of any information from a student's education record. Because test scores make up a large part of any final grade, sharing these results with other students is probably a no-no.
This happened all the time in my high school.
Yeah, high school is a good place to stomp all over kid's rights. Somebody has to put them in their place...