Summary
Are you grading your math tests and assignments exclusively by hand? If so, your students may be missing out!
This wasn’t always the case. Until recently, automated grading systems have been very limited in the questions they could ask, which made them of dubious value in STEM courses (science, technology, mathematics, and engineering). A multiple-choice question just couldn’t tell you if the student understood how to solve the problem, and even that’s assuming the system could handle the mathematical notation and the plots needed to ask that multiple-choice question properly in the first place. These systems simply could not provide you with a reliable view of your students’ comprehension, and as a result, it was a bad idea to rely on them. And so STEM instructors avoided these systems, or if forced to use them, grumbled and did their best to keep the grading system’s limitations from hurting their students.
But today’s grading technology has advanced to the point where you are arguably doing your students a disservice if you don’t include a good automated testing and assessment tool in your grading mix. In this article, we’ll examine some of those arguments, consider what characteristics would go into an effective assessment tool for STEM, and then take a brief look at how one such tool, Möbius meets those requirements.