The future of written (math) assessments: new, efficient and digital tools for manual grading

In the last years, at D-MATH we have very successfully transformed large parts of our exams to the digital era, in particular by using all the question types that Moodle provides. Nevertheless, one substantial part of our exams still lacks a modern handling: open questions where the students hand in a handwritten solution on paper that has to be graded manually.

Here comes the present projects into the play: We want to establish a unified setting for all types of questions – either directly in Moodle or one that at least allows an easy connection to Moodle – including in particular open questions in order to match the limited resources in graders, the rapidly growing student number and to retain and even improve the didactical quality of assessments at ETH.

Such a unified solution has among others the huge benefits of simplified logistics, efficient and highly accurate grading, improved viewing possibilities for the students and opens new didactical horizons for designing exams. The incorporation of problem solving tasks and proof based questions fosters productive and creative thinking in our students preparing them for their professional future.

In addition, future formative assessments strongly advised under PAKETH would be performed in the same environment providing the lecturers (not only at D-MATH but of all departments) a smart and handy platform where also the students have easily access to the results of their performances and can receive corresponding feedback.

– Proposing / developping a platform that allows an efficient but still flexible grading of open, problem solving questions. This includes: the implementation of a grading scheme in such a way that points obtained according to such a grading scheme can simply given by e.g. clicking on a suitable icon the possibility to add individual comments/feedback (in the spirit of a sticky note or comment in a PDF document), in particular for non standard answers and inidactions of errors an immediate and automated calculation of the obtained points.

– Establishing a concise streamline of grading exams containing open problems and proof based questions.

The innovation of the present project is that the incorporation of open, problem-solving and proof-based questions in our exams/assessments will be entirely brought to the digital era.

The gain in efficiency of the grading will free valuable time of our PhD students (who do the majority of the grading work) for their own research, while keeping the high standards of our education and even improve it by allowing exam designs that are more oriented towards the application of what had been learnt instead of reproducing acquired knowledge.