Paperless Grading
Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Teaching | 5 Comments
After a quarter century of grading student essays & carring around a briefcase stuffed with student work for the better part of each semester, I am making the leap to on-line electronic grading. I am using Turnitin’s Grademark system &Â though I’ve only done a few essays so far, it has been working very well. The system is flexible enough to let me underline, insert, highlight, drop in an icon that opens a comment, etc. There are also some rubric & grammar libraries I haven’t gotten into yet.
The main thing I notice is that I have been taking more time on each essay. More time than I can afford, actually. I’m hoping I’ll get more efficient as I become more familiar with the tool. I think that if students take the time to go through comments — which will be much easier for them given my scrawling handwriting — that this system will provide more effective written feedback than I have been able to give in the past. That is, I think this is a good tool. Maybe not revolutionary, but a real advance on paper & green pen.
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5 Responses to “Paperless Grading”
I’ll be interested to see if the time-to-grade gets shorter as you go along. My faculty advisor this semester and I have a halfway-electronic system: I email my poems and essays, and he mails them back with handwritten comments. I can really understand the value of pen on page – even with TabletPCs it seems awkward to try to replicate that freedom and expressiveness. Often, in the revision process I’ll print out a poem and mark it up by hand because somehow dealing with paper seems to unlock a different part of my brain than when I’m following a cursor across a screen.
Robert, so far I like the tools the system gives me pretty well. I can drop an icon anywhere into a student’s paper that opens up to a comment. I can underline & there are little explanations of things like passive voice & verb agreement that I can also use to tag problems. But then I’m not using this to teach creative writing. These are expository essays in general ed courses. Not that teaching this sort of writing isn’t important — I take it seriously. In many cases, I have seen drafts of the essays I’m grading online & have talked to students about developing them.
It so happens that I’m not teaching CW this semester; when I do teach CW, I have the luxury of small classes & I use mostly conferences & workshops.
As for my own work, I too often print things out & mark them up. In fact, most of my poems begin as handwritten scrawls on the back of an envelope or leftover quiz. I encourage all of my students, whether intro to lit or CW to use their hands on their writing.
Maybe I’m just a romantic, but I’m fond of all the various editorial marks (like paragraph, capitalize, reverse the order of these two, etc.) and love being able to circle a big fat prose passage and draw a line to where it should be reinserted. Somehow editing on paper just feels nice.
At work, we use electronic tools to scour software source code, looking for patterns and differences. But somehow the old-fashioned art of markup remains dear to me. Can you put all the traditional marks in electronically?
I almost always scrawl in a notebook (DaVinci wrote backwards; I just write like a doctor so only I can read it back). The place where I’ve found electronic text useful is in considering the shape of a poem – i.e. the one-keystroke line break (enter). Usually I get it into electronic form in a text-only editor before going to Word, since auto-correct can be so distracting. But for initial material, nothing beats scribbling.
The tool I’m using allows me to do pretty detailed markup & it explains the meaning of the marks to the students, most of whom have to be told what that backwards double stroke P means anyway. I love those marks, too, especially that little curlicue you draw up from a coma or some other mark of punctuation to mean “remove.”
So far I like Turnitin’s Grademark system, but get back to me next week after I’ve used it to grade 50 essays.
Yes – I love the curled omit mark as well.
Hopefully the cumbersomeness of electronic grading is mitigated by … something?