ONLINE GRADING PLATFORMS, IMPROVE QUALITY AND EFFICIENCY OF GRADING!

Online collaborative grading platforms are used to improve student learning and to improve the workflow of grading of assignments and exams.

This presentation will be a hands-on overview on how online grading platforms are used, the benefits, and the challenges.

We have been using two different online grading platforms since the fall of 2015 in math and physics courses. The number of instructors, teaching assistants and graders using these platforms grew from 27, Fall 2017, to over 430 in just two and a half years. In that time we graded over 1800 assessments (exams or homework assignments), for 11,000 students totaling almost 1 million graded pages.

Grading in online grading platforms allows the easy use and reuse of grading comments, an efficient way to provide more detailed feedback to students. Performance statistics for each problem or page are automatically created by online grading platforms, providing information on the score distribution of problems. In addition, instructors can easily access student work electronically to review the performance of a particular student. Without an online grading platform, the extensive grading of written assignments with detailed feedback to students would not be possible.

While using these grading platforms we were surprised by grading inconsistencies. We have learned to set aside more time to oversee the grading which is easily done by looking at the grading online. We look for grading consistency as well as for quality of feedback to students. More importantly, however, we are learning to write better rubrics, and to communicate them clearly to graders.