DailyDirt: Making The Grade...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

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. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
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Filed Under: cheating, classes, education, grading, moocs, online courses, proctoring, software, tests


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  • identicon
    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 ]

  • identicon
    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 ]

  • identicon
    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 ]


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