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."

Re:If you can automate, should you be grading?

[fm6]

Your teacher was a smart person. But she was lucky the bureaucracy let her get away with it. And that none of the students went whining to their parents about being made to do homework that wasn't graded. With school more bureaucratic and political than ever, I doubt if that would be allowed today.

Re:Multiple Guess

[bluGill]

There are times for memorization, and there are times when you need to go farther. In math you always need to go farther and understand the concepts. In shop you must get 100% (no misses allowed!) on the safety memorization test before you are allowed to take the test on real tools. Of course knowing that the margin of safety on some saw is 10 inches doesn't mean you won't put your fingers closer to the blade, but if you don't know that number it means you will.

Memorization is important. Do not overlook the value of memorizing some things (even if you will never need to know that poem once you pass the class, it is still useful to do it). Though overall I agree that there is too much focus on memorizing (mostly on the wrong thing!) in school, that doesn't mean you can get rid of memorizing.

Do less grading!!

[MagicDude]

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.

Re:Multiple Guess

[SlamMan]

At some level you have to think about what's logistically possible for a teacher. Say you teach 8th grade science. Your school has 8 mods (or periods, whatever they call em these days), 6 of which you teach students during, 1 for your lunch, and 1 for "planning", which is usually spent deal with school bureaucracy, possibly calling parents, or once in a while doing actual lesson plans for the next day.

Each of your 6 classes has 30-35 students.

Every time you give an assignment to you students, you get 180-210 papers back to grade. Thats 210 papers back about every day. How do you find the time to grade 210 papers every day?

Now imagine each of those papers was a free response, encouraging you to think, and show ability to use what you've learned.

Now add in how much time it would take to come up with those questions, for 180 school days.