Digital Grading Follow-Up

THE BACKGROUND
Back in March, I wrote a post called “Want Some Free Red Pens?” on my dream for digital exam grading. In my ideal world, I’d remove all the paper from my office entirely. Having only digital copies of exams would be splendid since I could get a lovely potted plant to put in place of my institutional-looking filing cabinet. Last semester, I did accomplish my goal of grading an entire set of exams without using any non-digital ink. Now I finally have the time to tell you how it went.

The exam was for our “Introductory Calculus” (MATH 120) course. It was the third exam of the semester and I had about 30 students enrolled. I gave the same exam I would have otherwise — it wasn’t an online test. If you’re really interested, you can find a copy of the test here. I photocopied it like usual, and my students took it like usual. I did choose 1-sided copies over my usual preference for double-sided to help with the scanning task.

THE PROCESS

  1. Write, photocopy, proctor, collect exam. Alphabetize exams by student lastname and remove staple.
  2. Scan exams to PDF files using department’s Xerox machine; export as e-mail attachment to myself.
  3. Use husband’s perl script to “pull apart” multi-exam PDF file into 7-page segments. Rename files “lastname-exam3.pdf”. Transfer each file to iPad and open in GoodNotes.
  4. Correct each exam, save graded copy as “lastname-exam3-done.pdf”, compile exam grades, and upload grades onto our LMS.
  5. Use LaTeX’s “pdfpages” package to combine each annotated exam with a very thorough “Solution Key” (with comments, hints, suggestions, etc) at the end. Send each student an e-mail containing their exam’s feedback with the Solution Key & notification that official exam grade is available on LMS. [This was done to avoid FERPA issues about sending graded assignments, or grades themselves, over e-mail.]
  6. Save un-graded exams in my filing cabinet in case any student wants to pick theirs up. (As it turned out, no one did.)

THE GOOD THINGS
Here are the things I did like:

  • No crayon marks! No spilled orange juice! No paper shuffling! No page flipping! No running out of ink! Grading at home with a toddler is a tedious process, but being able to get in eight minutes of grading while also providing parental supervision was fantastic.
  • Forced Solutions. By giving every student a full Solution Key, I was able to write things like “See Remark on page 5” instead of re-writing the same paragraph of comments over and over again. Also, I didn’t have to feel guilty about printing thirty copies of said Solution Key, and I knew each and every student had been given the chance to see the solutions. (Usually, I upload the Solution Key to our LMS, but not every student bothers reading it, which is weird.)
  • Grading was Fast! During the “active grading” phase, I think it went faster than grading on paper. I didn’t have to spend time turning pages. I could Copy-and-Paste similar remarks from one test onto a different test. Because I didn’t need as much physical desk space to spread out, I was able to get in five minutes of grading here, four minutes of grading there, and so forth, so I think I was able to return the exams sooner than I would have otherwise.

THINGS NEEDING IMPROVEMENT

  • Hello, Copy Room. With about thirty students and a 7-page exam, the scanning task involved around 200 pages. It turns out that our Xerox machine does not like it when you ask it to scan anywhere near this many pages at once. After trying to scan 8 exams at once (56 pages), the Xerox’s “brain” would get hung up mid-process and a machine reboot was necessary. After this happened twice, I realized that I could only really scan 28-pages at once. So I set up four exams, pressed “SCAN”, and waited three minutes; lather, rinse, repeat. Four exams taking three scanning minutes meant about half an hour in the Copy Room I would have liked to spend elsewhere. (Thankfully, this wasn’t a total time loss since I could work on other tasks while the copy machine whirred.)

    A colleague let me know that elsewhere on campus, there exists a better copy machine that could handle this type of task more easily. But, accounting for walking to-and-from time, I am not sure this would have taken any less than thirty minutes anyhow.

  • Returning Exams. It had been my plan to use the LMS’s “Dropbox” functionality to return the exams. Unfortunately, I lost over an hour of my life trying to get this to work — without any success whatsoever. We use a Desire2Learn product, and after consulting back-and-forth with my Instructional Technologist, we concluded that you cannot return graded work unless a student has submitted ungraded work first.

    In other words, there is no way for me to return a PDF file to a student unless and until they have uploaded a (potentially blank) PDF file to me. So, basically, there is a way to “reply” to an uploaded student document, but there is no way for me to “send” a student an uploaded document first.

  • Big File Sizes. One has to be careful about writing too many GoodNotes comments. GoodNotes didn’t do a great job of compressing the PDF file size, and our LMS refused to allow me to send any file over 2MB in size as an e-mail attachment. Some of the exams were over this limit (too many comments) and others weren’t. To be fair, I am not sure if this is more annoying because of GoodNotes or more annoying because of our LMS. I also don’t know if GoodNotes has gotten better at saving from a GoodNotes document to an annotated PDF and keeping the file size smaller.

CONCLUSION

In the end, I don’t know if I’ll try this process again anytime soon. The biggest time drainers were the Xerox scanning & learning what didn’t work. If I were to do this again, I might investigate a better scanning technology. I would certainly ask my students to submit a blank PDF file to the LMS Dropbox, so I could “grade it” and instead return to them their graded test papers. My students really liked having a digital copy of their tests — it meant that when final exam week rolled around, they didn’t have to dig through their course materials to find their test. So, maybe I will revisit this idea sometime in the future? I’ll let you know if I do.

Want Some Free Red Pens?

I’m about 75% through this round of midterm exam grading. Overall, I’m down to around 100 students in total, over three classes. I’ll give four midterm exams and a final exam at the end of the semester. This requires a lot of red ink.

A while ago, I read an inspiring article in the MAA FOCUS called “Abandon the Red Pen!” written by Maria H. Andersen. The article was about digital grading. Since I read it, digital grading has been a dream of mine. Ideally, here’s what I’d like to do with the pile of exams currently sitting on my dining room table:

  1. Students take exams in class, on paper, like usual.
  2. After students turn in exams, magic happens. I end up having a PDF file of each individual exam paper, titled something like “StudentLastName-Calculus-Exam2.pdf”
  3. I dump all of the PDF files into a Dropbox folder and then I do all of the exam grading on my iPad.
  4. Once I’m done, I save each file as “StudentLastName-Calculus-Exam2Graded.pdf” and then more magic happens, and each student gains access to their graded exam — perhaps over e-mail, or through the file server in our Learning Management System, or some other solution.

Overlooking the requisite magic requirements, let me explain why I’d prefer this to offline grading:

  • I wouldn’t have to carry 100 exams home, keep them away from my toddler, make sure I don’t lose any to black hole of my desk, try to avoid spilling coffee on them, etc.
  • I would have a complete digital record of a student’s work. Occasionally a student comes to me at the end of the course and says, “I just checked the online gradebook. It says I earned grade X%, but I am certain I earned grade (X+4)%.” Sometimes they are able to produce the test paper and the gradebook indeed has an error. Sometimes they aren’t able to produce the test paper, and I can’t do anything for the student. Having a digital PDF file of every graded exam would solve this issue immediately.
  • In the unfortunate case of dishonest work, I would have a clear record. (For instance, if a student modifies their test paper after it is graded and returned, and then asks for more credit on a problem. This has happened in the past.)

But the most important reason I’d love to switch to digital exam grading is that I could give better comments in less time. On the current test, all students had to solve a similar “Optimization” problem involving having a constrained amount of fencing to build a backyard of area A. For the most part, students fell into one of three categories: (A) Response entirely correct; (B) Response entirely incorrect or missing or blank; or (C) Response partially correct, but some errors were made. In category (C), there were only about three types of errors: That is, everyone who made a mistake made one of the same three mistakes.

Digital grading would allow me to type up a full response as to what the error was, why it was not correct, and how to fix it. I would only have to type the response once. I could save it as a JPG file. Then whenever a student made that particular error, I could just “drag and drop” the response onto their test paper.

Also, eventually I’d have JPG stamps for the big “Top 100 Algebra Errors”, things like sqrt(9+16) is not the same as sqrt(9)+sqrt(16). I would never have to write anything about this mistake again because I could just drag and drop the explanation JPG!

Now, the tricky part: How do I get the magic to happen? The photocopy machine in my department is quite happy to take 8 pages, scan them to a PDF, and e-mail them to me. So, for a particular student’s exam, I could undo the staple, run it through the copy machine, and I’d be done. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do this en masse very efficiently.

Suppose I have 100 exam papers, each 8-10 pages. How do I remove all of the staples, run each one through the copy machine individually, and rename the files? This process seems very easy, but I estimate it would take about a minute per exam. At this point, I’d rather spend 100 minutes doing the grading than 100 minutes dealing with the paper shuffle. Hence I need magical elves. Or graduate students.

Since I haven’t figured out how to do this first step, I haven’t given much thought as to how to “hand back” the graded files. I’m sure there’s probably some easy way to do this in our LMS, so maybe it wouldn’t even require magic.

Do you have any ideas about how to do the first step (i.e., scan each individual exam paper to PDF) that doesn’t require magic, graduate students, or administrative assistants? I’m happy to send you all my red pens in trade for such information.