Online marking

[pmdc199]

I have searched the site and it seems a few years since this has been discussed. I use the VLE (Moodle) but find that using word mark up is very time consuming and to sell it to others could be hard. Anyone else have a better solution please?

[SteveBentley]

We use GradeMark - it comes as part of Turnitin which we use for originality checking (aka plagiarism deterrent/detection). Not sure whether they price themselves out of the school market, but it's used by pretty much the whole University sector. Turnitin are trying to reposition themselves from a plagiarism checker with marking bolted on to a marking system with integrated originality checking.

The marking bit works using a palette of canned "Quick Marks" which you can customise. These do the common issues to save typing, although you can keep them generic and then add a further specific comment to each instance of it. You then get a box for overall feedback at the end, and you can even voice record that if you want. There's a rubric feature, so you can set up a marking grid and have that calculate the final score for the piece of work, and optionally transfer to your VLE.

Avoid the E-Rater function though - it's supposed to do spelling and grammar checking, but it's just not accurate enough in our testing, it takes longer to go through and remove the false positives it's picked up than it would to mark it yourself.

Allegedly they're going be introducing offline marking on iPads in the new year, but I tend to take their roadmap with a pinch of salt until the new feature is actually here. Several "coming soon" features have been dropped when they realised they couldn't implement them.