A Simple Proposal to Make Exam Grading Easier
And part is trying to read their handwriting. That is the part that can be solved.
Nowadays, most students have computers and are used to using them. Twenty-some years ago I came up with an idea for software to let students take exams on computers. The project, which never got very far, was going to be called Electric Bluebook. Many years later, someone else did it; the law school where I do most of my teaching uses their software to let students take exams on their own laptops
When I was designing Electric Bluebook I was mostly concerned with ways in which the computer could make taking and grading exams easier. My version would have let students keep track of which questions were unanaswered, which finished, which they wanted to go over again if there was time. At the professor's end, the software could show the professor all answers to question 1 in random order, thus eliminating the problem of shuffling bluebooks or letting a bad answer on one question bias the grading of another.
The software that was actually written had a rather different set of priorities. It was designed to solve one and only one problem: cheating. The programmers faced, and I gather solved, the difficult problem of how to let a student use their software while locking him out of everything else on his computer—which might include class notes, answers to old exams, even a downloaded textbook. I liked my design better, but I understand the depressing reasons for theirs.
Currently I am grading exams from a course I volunteered to teach at a different and poorer school, one which does not have such software, with the result that all exams are handwritten. It occurred to me that, as the price of computers falls, one solution would be for the school to have a bunch of cheap laptops dedicated to the sole purpose of taking exams on, wiped clean of everything else after each use.
Then it occurred to me that there is a much cheaper solution, a readily available source of free computers for the purpose.
Match up two classes that take their exams at the same time. Tell the students that if they bring a laptop, carefully labeled with their name, they will probably be able to take their exam on a laptop--but not theirs. Advise them to password protect anything on their laptop they want to keep private. Before the exam begins, randomly trade laptops between the two classes. Put the exam for each class on all laptops used in that class. When the exam is over, transfer the files representing the completed exams to the professor's computer and return all laptops to their owners.
One can imagine a variety of practical problems, but I think most of them have straightforward solutions. Students no longer have to scribble, professors are saved from eyestrain, and the only cost is a little time spent shuffling laptops.