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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."
Hi, I'm a CS student and always looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks. Is there any project out there that can do my work for me so that I don't have to?
Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
Assessment should be about the students knowing the material. Stuff like showing your work goes a long way. Math is the easiest to automate, but that would only show you that the student got the correct answer, not where the answer came from (like from a friend!).
To lower you work load, flip a coin on whether the students will hand in the work. If they aren't handing it in, trade with another student and grade it in class. Scantron only sends the message to your students that you are too lazy to look at their work, so why should they put any effort into it.
What, me worry?
Not really a technological answer to what you were looking for, but I think it's worth mentioning. You say that you spend most of your time grading. I don't know how many students you teach, but I'm wondering if it's just a matter of you giving too much busywork to your students that you in turn have to grade. In my high school calculus class, my teacher assigned homework but he never graded it. At the beginning of every class, he make a quick pass around to see who had done it, and mark you off if you hadn't. He would then pass out an answer key for the assignment and go over any questions people had. His policy on homework was that it helps some people, and is just a pain in the butt for others. So the deal was that if your semester average was over 90%, there was no penealty for not doing homework. If your average was between 80 and 90, then you lost 0.5% for each homework not done, and so forth. As such, the only thing he graded for our class were the exams he gave every 3-4 weeks. So I'm just saying that perhaps the answer isn't to find faster ways to grade, but eliminating some of the pointless grunt work for you and for your students.