By Mark Jordan

When I taught at San Jose State University, I loved teaching, but hated grading. How I wish I’d known about Alchemer and the Google Sheets integration. The first time I employed it to track feedback from a survey, I saw how easy it would have made grading exams.  

Let me show you easy it is.  

First of all, you’ll need a Professional or Full Access license to get the Google Sheets integration, but the extra expense is a lot better than spending a weekend grading exam (in my humble opinion). However, adding Quiz Score only requires a Collaborator license. 

Adding Basic Questions 

One thing I really appreciate is that I can make the name and email address required by simply clicking a button.  

You can start the exam with a couple of quick multiple guess questions, like this. 

If you prefer, you can use Checkboxes to have students select all of the relevant answers (I like this approach because it reinforces the teaching as opposed to testing what students remember). 

Using Merge Codes and Piping to Populate Questions 

You can even ask questions that feed into the next question. For example, here I give students a choice of eight major influences in Renaissance Italy. When they pick one, that artist populates the next question. To do this, you need to Add Page before the question you want to populate with a previous answer. Then leave a space for the merge code. 

If you want to use Piping/Repeat to feed answers from a previous question for sorting, for example, you select the question with the answers from which you want to populate. In this case, we want to ask students to sort the reasons for the Renaissance to begin in Italy in descending order. To do that, we click the Piping/Repeat tab at the top of the question window, select the question we want, and click “Pipe Selected Items” to populate your new question with the results from the earlier question. Again, you will need a page break between the two questions. 

Be careful with piping and Google Sheets. A lot of complex piping can cause problems. Test the survey and results to make sure it works before distributing the exam. 

In the Build screen, the questions will look rather unimpressive. However, when you look at the actual test, it looks like this. 

Simplifying Life with Shortcuts 

Say you build a question with eight answers, and you want to ask another question with the same eight answers, you can Copy the question. Now all you need do is ask the new question.  

There are other ways to build True/False questions, but I like to group them. I use the Radio Button Grid for True/False because it’s easy to set up. Label your column headers True and False, then ask the questions in the Row Headers.  

Adding It All Up 

Now that we’ve finished the questions, it’s time to tally their scores. I included a brief essay question that I will have to evaluate and grade, but the rest of the scoring is done automatically.  

After you add the Quiz Score Action, you need to assign points for each question. You can also make it pass/fail with just the right answers. In that case, you can determine that say, anything more than 75% is a passing grade. I chose to score each question with a different weight.  

The Google Sheet integration allows you to import scores automatically into a spreadsheet.  

You can line this up with your grading sheet that you submit at the end of the term. For this purpose, I created one for the midterm exam. I could have created this as a separate sheet in a larger grading spreadsheet, with the results feeding into the term grading sheet. In this sheet, I let the quiz score record automatically, while the short essay I will grade separately.  

The results tab will also give you this information at the bottom. Then you can scroll up and read the essay and score it. Obviously, this student did not put a whole lot of thought into his essay. 

Even though I still have to grade the essay by hand (and eye), Alchemer has taken the mundane part and scored it for me. Even with multiple-choice tests, this saves me at least 15 minutes of checking (and in my case, double-checking) that I’ve scored it properly. That’s a quarter hour for each of 20 or more students, which is five hours when you think about it.  

More Than Easy Grades 

If you are doing research that involves surveying people or having students log information, you can use the same software. When I was working on my thesis, this would have made life so much easier than taking paper and scoring it for each researcher on the team. We could have entered our findings on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, and the results would automatically tally.  

Unlike many research tools, Alchemer doesn’t require you to buy modules or packages to do different things. You can use the same solution for registrations, event scheduling, research, grading, even evaluations. Which means that you can license the software under your research grants and use it across the board. 

Plus, there’s a good chance that Alchemer is already approved for use at your school. In that case, procurement is a snap – and who doesn’t enjoy skipping through the procurement process? 

If you want to read more about the Alchemer approach to education, click here: https://www.alchemer.com/alchemer-for-education-institutions/  

The post Automating Grading So You Can Focus on Teaching appeared first on Alchemer.

Learn more about our Education solutions here.

Flexibility

You can use Alchemer to perform complex research, simple surveys, and even have certain answers automate an email or other action outside of the survey. One of the largest and oldest teaching hospitals uses Alchemer to conduct scientific research into both the U.S. population as well as health practitioners. You can read more here.

A large aircraft manufacturer uses Alchemer to create event registrations and business process workflows (including expense reports, ordering service, and visitor requests). They also conduct customer satisfaction surveys that trigger automatic responses from senior executives. And they track pilot safety – such as sleep, diet, and flights piloted – to determine if a pilot is safe to fly that day. Academic researchers conducting sleep and diet studies could customize the solution to track how participants feel and respond during the studies.

Yet another customer performs qualitative and quantitative research for the grocery and food retail industries. They regularly look at buying trends and buyer intention nationwide as well as by neighborhood. And they run in-depth statistical analysis on the feedback they receive. This is very similar to research your admissions office could run on populations where you draw the most students, or your academic researchers could conduct to see where different groups get their social cues. You can read more here.

Quizzes and Assessments

Several clients use Alchemer for quizzes and assessments to assess how students are learning. With Alchemer, you can mix essay questions with multiple-choice and single-line answers. In addition to collecting all the answers digitally, you can also see trends so that you can clarify any area where multiple students had challenges.

Easy to Learn and Master

Alchemer is repeatedly voted Most Implementable and Highest User Adoption by users at G2.com. In fact, more than half of the people who use Alchemer fielded their first survey in less than one day. One of the largest online travel companies in the world standardized on Alchemer, expecting their users to push back. Instead, they were happy because they could do everything they wanted with Alchemer, and it took no time to learn.

Conduct the Research You Need

With Alchemer, you are not charged per response. So your research teams can conduct the surveys they need, while your instructors quiz and test students, your admissions office collects student information, and your alumni association keeps your donors happy. You can collect all the research and feedback you need, without worrying about paying extra for each response or going over your allotment.

With no charge per response, you don’t need separate solutions for each department or use. Which saves you additional money because you are not paying premiums for multiple single-use deployments. You can consolidate and negotiate an annual fee. And we’ll even lock in that pricing for three years.

Centralized IT Guardrails

Research and surveys often collect personal information – including personally identifiable information (PII) – that can be valuable to hackers. Consolidating on Alchemer’s flexible solution not only allows you to collect all of the information you need, it also allows your IT department to secure that data. One client’s IT department wrote a single line of code that removed PII from millions of surveys, without affecting the research gathered.

The data you collect with Alchemer is stored in the cloud, secured by industry-leading controls. We are:

• GDPR and CCPA compliant
• ISO 27001 Certified
• SOC2, Type II Certified

You can learn more about our security efforts here.

Easy to Integrate

Alchemer was designed to make it easy to create actions based on feedback. This means that instructors could set up quizzes to record correct answers. You can also create integrations with no programming experience to learning management system (LMS) or the online tools (for finance, support, registration, grading, and more) that you already have in place. With Alchemer, you can collect data and automate processes from:

• Future students for registration
• Current students for class selection
• Alumni for outreach
• Booster programs for fundraising
• Teacher evaluations for reporting
• Online quizzes and tests for grading
• Purchase orders for finance
• Expense reports for faculty and staff
• Service requests for IT and facilities
• Housing requests for students
• HR requests for faculty and staff

Easy to Customize

Alchemer was designed to make it easy to customize your surveys to do much more. One satellite broadcasting company even used Alchemer to create a mini customer database solution. They also created an internal review site for approved travel lodging, with recommendations and notes. The customer database was created by IT, but the travel review site was created in the training department. Alchemer empowers anybody to solve big or little challenges without learning how to program. What your people can do with Alchemer really only depends on the creativity of the people using it.

• Custom Scripting. With a library of useful functions or the ability to add your own custom code, JavaScript and custom scripting allow you to add highly customized, sophisticated, and dynamic survey behavior to your projects.   
• Advanced Reporting Options. Take advantage of 12 sophisticated reporting options, including crosstab reports, conjoint analysis, open-text analysis, fall-off reports and R Scripting capabilities.  
• SPSS Export. For serious, in-depth statistical analysis, you can export data from any survey using our SPSS export tool. 
• API Access. Use our API to build custom integrations and applications. 
• More Question Types. More than 30 question types, plus the ability to develop new types of questions will help your researchers gather the information they need. Plus advanced logic and branching means you reduce survey fatigue. 

You Need Flexibility and Power, Not Budget Increases If you’re struggling with budgets and costs, let’s talk. The team at Alchemer is dedicated to making sure you can get the most bang for your budget. You can learn more here, or call us at 1-800-609-6480 today, and let’s create a research-and-more platform that can grow and change with you

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