Marshall, Jonathan

markeR: a shiny app for marking assignments

Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North

Marking assignments is a lot of work. In ye olden times with pen and paper, it was relatively quick to provide concise, useful comments to each student on their work highlighting where they did particularly well or went wrong. With paperless assignments, this is more time consuming, as PDF annotation typically takes longer and is more cumbersome than hand writing comments on paper. Further, the manual tasks of collating and entering marks is still subject to arithmetic and data entry error with manual checking being required. Where multiple markers are involved in marking the same question, there is additionally consistency issues to be ironed out which is hard to check manually.

markeR is a shiny app designed for marking assignment work. It allows mark entry and a selection of comments to be applied to each question, storing the results per question in a database and producing a summary report for each student with both marks and comments on each question. While the main goal is to make the marking process more efficient, it has the added benefit of providing additional data on which comments are used most often, and how the marks are distributed per sub-question that may be useful for adapting teaching or assessment practice.

This is a lightning talk.