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Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Hacking Google Forms to Grade Paper

It should not come as a surprise to you that I am a fan of spreadsheets and forms. I use forms for collecting canine data, scheduling volunteers, managing birthday databases, and even grading papers.

Yes, I absolutely love using them for grading papers. Here's some examples of forms I've build in Google Docs: beer exchanges, weight submissions, and the example that I'm showing. If you haven't used Google Forms before, here's a how to guide. It is super simple and totally free.
Before I jump into the example of grading papers, here's why I love it.

1. Reduce paper consumption. I hate wasting papers. They get lost. They get eaten by my dogs. They have to be physically transported. If a student is handwriting the paper, the handwriting probably isn't as nice as print.
2. I have a digital record of when they paper was submitted. The whole "I put it in your mailbox by *insert date*" claim won't work.
3. I can check the papers from anywhere - my laptop, my ipad, and even my iphone.
4. That also means, I can grade the papers on my ipad! It is fantastic. I used to load the documents on the ipad and grade them while I'm on the elliptical.
5. Once I grade the papers by adding the grades as a column on the end, I merge them with my excel gradebook. I can also keep all their papers (each in an xls sheet) along with their grades all in a single file by copying the sheets into my gradebook.


This long screen shot is the entire form I use for paper submissions. I include all the relevant information in the description at the top. That includes the prompt, due date, my contact information, and other materials. The questions follow.



Here's a zoomed in version of the questions. I make sure that the name and ID fields are required, otherwise students will forget to identify their own work.



This is what the file spreadsheet looks like when you are read to evaluate your students' work. Everything is in a nice and handy file that is easy to merge with their grade sheets. Give it a try, save time, and be super efficient.

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