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Blog Post

Grade Smarter

Modernize scantron testing

Modernize scantron grading for your school with GradeHub’s newest release. After gaining invaluable educator feedback from over 30 major institutions, we’ve enhanced capacity and security and added multiple correct responses and multiple answer keys.

You’ve used bubble sheets for decades. Nearly all of the technology on your campus has been upgraded, but grading with answer sheets is still back in the 70’s. With GradeHub, we make grading better for you and your students, and with our latest release, we’ve also made it more scalable and secure.

GradeHub is part of a growing trend of educational technology companies helping higher education upgrade closed hardware and software applications to cloud services where the data can be used to improve educational effectiveness and learning.

Grading answer sheets on our hub will improve teacher access, increase student feedback, ease IT administration, and unlock valuable testing data for teachers, students, and learning management systems.

We’ve painstakingly focused on simplicity and minimizing faculty disruption even though we’ve radically changed the technology employed to create, grade, and analyze multiple-choice tests given with bubble sheets.

Modernize scantron testing with scale and security

Most of the new enhancements to GradeHub are somewhat “behind the scenes” to our cloud-based infrastructure. These upgrades improve your experience and will delight the folks running your IT department.

Our new infrastructure improvements include we have:

  • Increased the capacity of answer sheets uploaded with a single click to accommodate HUGE class sections.
  • Reduced the time it takes to score answer sheets giving you results quicker.
  • Curtailed any lost information by maintaining six simultaneous replicas of your data.
  • Tightened cloud security to meet our and your IT organization’s high standards.
  • Committed to the Privacy Pledge to keep your student data private and secure.

In addition to scale and security, we added our two most requested features too–multiple correct responses to a question and multiple test keys for a test. On GradeHub, it’s incredibly simple to do both.

new Multiple correct responses to a question:

Many of you write test questions where more than one correct response is needed to receive credit. Now, you have the following test question options to accommodate multiple correct responses to a question:

  • Choose one (default option) – the student must choose the one correct response to receive credit
  • Choose all – the student must choose all of the correct responses to receive credit (up to five)
  • Choose any – the student can choose any of the correct responses to get credit (up to five)

As with most tests you write the default option in GradeHub’s answer key is “choose one” response. You can change from the “choose one” response type in the answer key by clicking on the upside-down triangle next to each question number and then selecting a different option in the drop-down menu. Here’s a screenshot of this new feature:

Multiple correct responses

With GradeHub, you can change the key at any time, and we’ll do all the rest to score or rescore your test.

Example

An example of our new grading feature using an Introduction to Accounting question follows:

4. Which of the following affects both the balance sheet and the income statement?
(A) Purchase of inventory
(B) Amortization of prepaid insurance
(C) Collection of accounts receivable
(D) Retirement of a machine
(E) Declaration of a cash dividend

In the accounting question, above, let’s say you initially selected “choose one” with B as the only correct answer. Amortization of prepaid insurance clearly affects both the balance sheet and income statement. After the test, a student points out that D is also correct for question number 4 under certain circumstances. Machine retirements may affect both the income statement and balance sheet if the machine is not fully depreciated. Since you didn’t clarify if the machine was fully depreciated or not, you decide to give credit for D too. At this point, all you need to do in GradeHub is to go back into your key, select the triangle, change the test response type to “choose any,” select both B and D, and then press “save.” Therefore, all students that responded B or D will be given credit for answering question 4 correctly and all reports are recalculated automatically. Slick!

new Multiple answer keys for a test:

When teaching large sections, faculty often use multiple test versions to curtail cheating. So in this release, we’ve added an easy way for you to grade up to five test versions. To add test versions to your exam, all you need to do is to change to a different key by just selecting the “Answer Key” dropdown box, fill in your answer key, and select “save.”

Multiple answer keys for a test

When students take your test and mark a test version, GradeHub automatically applies the marked key. If there is only one test key, GradeHub automatically assumes Answer Key “A.” Because we leverage current technology, we’ve made some cool improvements to modernize scantron testing. For example, there’s no need to sort your test by key before scanning. Also, you can indicate the key after testing for students that forgot to mark the test version.

We would love to hear your thoughts on what you think about your newest features. Tweet us @gradehub to let us know how it’s going.

Happy grading,

Mark

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