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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."
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!