Hack Your Classroom: Quick grade entry with Remark frees up time and gets you more data

Marking homework and exams is a huge time sink for any course. Then comes the dreaded task of entering the grades. Dozens of hours of your time, or TA time, can be spent each term entering grades.

Looking to dramatically reduce the number of hours spent entering grades?  Consider trying Remark.  This scanning technology is useful for so much more than multiple choice questions – open-ended questions, group exams, feedback, ranking, surveys, and more. Unlike Scantron sheets, YOU get to control what the scanning sheet looks like and you photocopy the sheets with an in-house photocopier – no more ordering expensive sheets!  Check out these examples: Homework grading sheetMidterm Cover Sheet, Group Exam form, and Concept Inventory/Survey Form.

Instead of hours entering grades, the process can take less than an hour for hundreds of students: grades for each question on a multi-question exam automatically processed and stored in an excel file. Not only that, you can structure your scanning sheet to include feedback codes (filled in by the grader) which can automatically be converted into comments that get uploaded onto Connect for students.

Another advantage of this software is that it captures images of all the scanned sheets.  So in addition to the grades (or other data captured by the filled-in “bubbles”) the software can also capture an image of student work. This alleviates tensions around cheating on regrades, and provides an additional source of data if you wish to analyze student responses for research.

The only component that must be purchased is the Remark software (licence for one PC computer costs about $1000 – but one computer is enough to service multiple courses). Once you have the software, you can download the fonts needed to create the custom bubble sheets, and away you go!

Want to try it out?  Get in touch with us and we would be happy to let you try our software and walk you through the process of creating your own custom scanning sheets and processing the data.

Happy Marking!