Crowdmark has become widely used at the University of Auckland, albeit with a little “encouragement” from Andrew Eberhard, faculty member in the university’s Business School and Director of its Business Masters program. Key in this was getting academics at his institution to see just how “easy and great” it was to use. The university had digital solutions in place for grading multiple choice questions, but nothing in place for marking handwritten work. Crowdmark provided the perfect one-stop-shop solution with its automated multiple choice grading feature combined with its rich suite of grading tools available to grade written work.
When first trying Crowdmark, the reaction by his team members was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, his own grading team found it so easy that when they went back to paper after having had mid-semester tests on Crowdmark he could “hear groans” because of how badly they wanted to grade on Crowdmark again.
Like many of our customers, Andrew found the ability to divide tests up by question and have dedicated team members for each question to be a huge advantage relative to paper-based tests. While his team could do this on paper, “there is a lot of shuffling around…people are swapping scripts around and it’s a real pain, and also they all have to be together”.
While Crowdmark enabled his team to grade whenever and wherever they wanted, the scanning of completed assessments brought his team together in an unexpected way. As a creative method for cutting off the staples from these assessments, they “invested in a giant guillotine to chop off the staples”.
Andrew is amazed by the fact that he’s “never had a complaint about Crowdmark” from any of the more than 8000 students he’s assessed using the platform. Aside from the richer feedback, he thinks this may be due to the fact that students can now view their feedback with the click of a button at any time. Before Crowdmark, students had to go to the student resource centre to view their exams. Seeing as how there was “a big pile of them which nobody has ever picked up” the last time he went there, however, he thinks they largely remained unseen.
Thanks to his trusty guillotine, Andrew’s confident that his exams will no longer gather dust. Residing within his students’ academic portfolios on Crowdmark, they are now available to students 24/7.
Battle scars and all.
Andrew Eberhard was interviewed by Michelle Caers, CEO, Crowdmark.