DailyDirt: Making The Grade...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Mar 7th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Technology can be very useful for helping teachers reach out to more students and for spreading information efficiently among schools. Some grading can be automated, but obviously not all grading can be done with heuristics and strict rules. Here are just a few examples of grading challenges that teachers are already facing that might need some technological improvement.

Grading on a curve can backfire if all of your students scheme to get the same grade: a zero. Grading policies have adapted to account for this boundary condition, so students beware.... [url]
Some startups are collecting as much grading data as they can, in hopes of obtaining some of the millions of venture capital directed at the education sector. Now when teachers threaten that students' actions will go on a permanent record, they actually have a database that will back them up. [url]
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) need to watch out for massive cheating schemes. Test proctoring software is getting more sophisticated, but presumably some students are always trying new ways to cheat. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: cheating, classes, education, grading, moocs, online courses, proctoring, software, tests

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 7 Mar 2013 @ 6:06pm

getting a zero.. should be automatic FAIL
Hopefully that professor has developed a better grading algorithm... one that accounts for everyone getting the same non-zero score, too.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Mar 2013 @ 8:30pm

If everyone gets a zero, and the grade is based on a percentage of the highest score, then the score received is 0/0. That's undefined. The professor would be perfectly justified in giving everyone a zero, or whatever grade he feels like.

But even if that were not the case, if I were grading, any student who refused to attempt the test would fail. I don't care if the math somehow says you get 100%. And if there was a stupid "rules are rules and you can't give a grade lower than what's in the syllabus" policy, I'd find an excuse to give one student one point of extra credit on that test nobody took.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 8 Mar 2013 @ 8:11am

I'm taking one of that professor's classes this semester. His policy is now that if everybody gets a zero on a graded item, or if it appears that we are collectively trying to game his curving system, then everybody does in fact get a zero on that item.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 8 Mar 2013 @ 1:21pm
  
  Re:
  It only takes one person to screw up that kind of cheating...
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]