Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

I've recently been assigned a course to teach where I need to mark lots of assignments. These assignments have 12 short answer questions and each student must do them.

Slowest part about marking these is having to context switch for each question. So I'd mark Q1 , then Q2 etc for one assignment, then go over to the next one and start back at Q1.

I figured this was super inefficient since I needed to have the answer and context of the question in my mind and keep switching.

So I wrote a program to parse all of the questions from all of the reports and present them to me in question batches. So now I see all of Q1 one after the other for each student's and mark those. Then once all of the Q1's are done, I mark all the Q2's. After all the marking is done, I run that through another program that then formats that data to each student so it's back onto their individual report plus any comments or deductions.

I find that apart from saving the time to have to open tonnes of docx files, now it takes maybe 5 mins to mark everything.

In similar spirit, Gradescope [1] is an excellent tool, that I just cannot do grading without now.

Students upload PDFs, and mark appropriate pages for each assigned question. The graders can then decide to either mark every question in a single sheet, or a single question in every sheet. I find the latter more comfortable. The key element here is that the burden of assigning pages to questions shifts from the grader to the student, which is a significantly better use of cognitive resources because it comes at little marginal cost to the student but tremendous cost for the grader.

[1]: https://www.gradescope.com

This was how we graded exams when I was a TA. Graders were assigned a specific question and would pass it off to the next station when done.

Yeah that makes sense and it should also reduce any bias if someone ruins their image with first question.

It also helps protect against unfairness from the slowly drifting mood of the marker.

At the same time, answers by a mediocre student that happens to be sorted just after answers from a horribly bad student, might seem quite brilliant.

Or seem not so good, if sorted after the best student.

So maybe the answer order should be random.

That's true. Ideally then, as you say, there should be a Fisher-Yates shuffle of the papers after each pass through.

There's a specific part of Thinking, Fast And Slow that addresses this exact point - consciously or not, you're also probably reducing the bias you'd give to subsequent answers from each student.

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