I built this because I was shocked at how inefficient the process of grading and entering grades was during my time as a teacher's assistant in college. If you've ever taken a multiple-choice test at a high school or university in the U.S., you've likely used Scantron forms before. These are handy for automatically grading multiple choice questions, but once they're graded the task of getting these grades into the school's LMS (i.e. BlackBoard, Canvas, Moodle) remains. As a TA, I would spend hours looking at grades printed on Scantron forms, then manually hand-keying these grades into the school's learning management system for dozens, if not hundreds of students a night. If you've ever entered grades before, you know that entering grades is a long, tedious, process.
Gradefinity makes grading easier in several ways:
1. It can be used with a regular office printer and scanner, so no specialized equipment (i.e. Scantron grading machine) is needed.
2. Each bubble sheet is pre-printed with a student ID number. When bubble sheets are uploaded, Gradefinity uses OCR to match the students' bubble sheet answers to their identity in the database, then enters the grades for the appropriate students.
3. Gradefinity also captures open-ended responses from students and displays this in an Assignment Review page for instructors to review, along with multiple choice answers. Instructors can leave feedback on these open-ended responses for the student to review later using their student log in credentials.
It also supports online testing and has quiz building tools as well. Grades can also be exported to .CSV from the online gradebook for further editing in the instructor's spreadsheet program of choice.
Here's a quick demo that runs through the grading process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vbDtFZeNM&t
I'd be super grateful if any teachers or professors on HN were to make an account and provide some feedback. The site is still pretty new at the moment, so despite relentless testing I apologize in advance for any bugs that you might run into.
- Brad
From the video, it seems like you are also using some visual recognition to match the correct answers on the scan. How are you doing this?
Are you calibrating the position of the sheets with some markers or are you expecting specific coordinates? Is there some AI involved? How accurate is your technique with real-life students filling in the boxes?
Is there some way to correct individual answers (and is there some feedback mechanism involved to do better next time)?
Anyway, congrats on shipping, looks super interesting!
I am in Austin as well - if, in the future, you ever need any Operations/Finance help, don't hesitate to reach out :)
Best of luck!
