Using Excel

e-Marking

Dr Mathew Hillier Lecturer in Higher Education, TEDI, University of Queensland

Contact: mathew.hillier at gmail.com

The set of excel workbooks featured in these slides is a branch of the Computer Aided Feedback & Assessment System (CAFAS), in particular the CAFAS Excel prototype version, See http://cafas.pbworks.com/Home

The original CAFAS project was funded by the Carrick Institute of Higher Education Australia Grant (2006-2007) [later the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and now Office of Learning and Teaching] lead by Martin Freney (PI) and Denise Wood at University of South Australia.

The original CAFAS project includes CAFAS online and the CAFAS excel prototype .

The improvements featured in this set of workbooks are by Mathew Hillier.

All work is produced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/

Acknowledgements

• An e-Marking tool based on MS Excel (not tied to the Internet). • Whole of class tracking across multiple assessments via linked

workbooks.• Enter data only once.• Each assessment set-up using templates. • Using a marking sheet or rubric style concept.• Each assessment item can have multiple number of criteria,

weighting etc.• Auto generation of separate sheets for each student. • Marking using sliders/scales (optional numeric entry)• Quick comment selection (from your comment bank) with

customisation on the fly.• Print all student sheets to separate PDFs (to send as feedback).• Generate a final course grade spreadsheet for upload to LMS.• Open source and fully customisable.

Features Overview

Data flows

Each student has a marking sheet for individual feedback.Breakdown. Grad quals.

Evaluate by sliders. Enter data only once.

Each assessment item has a workbook listing all students in the course. Names sourced from the course workbook.

Course workbook collates marks and calculates final grades.

Insert auto comments - editable on-the-fly. Sourced from comment bank.

Course workbook

Collates marks and calculates final grades.Establish the number of assessments in the course and their weighting.Provides the master student name/id list (to be used in each assessment workbook).Individual marks for each assessment drawn from the separate assessment workbooks.

* Student names and IDs are fictitious.

Assessment workbook

Each assessment item has a workbook listing all students in the course. The names are sourced from the course workbook.Marks are sourced from individual student sheets.Bulk printing of student sheets to individual PDFs

Student assessment sheet

Each student has a marking sheet for individual feedback. These are set up using a template and then created automatically for each student.This example shows applicable graduate

qualities (top-right corner) multiple criteria, weighting of criteria, penalties, marking a criteria with a

slider/scale or by numeric entry

tick to insert comments from bank (customisable on the fly)

Print to PDF button (single sheet print)

Comment bank

Initial comments developed for each criteria.These are then set-up on the assessment template prior to duplication for each student.New / additional comments can be added to the bank during marking and accessed via dropdown menus on the assessment sheet (the template can then be adjusted for subsequent offerings of the assessment).Comment banks can be shared between markers to increase inter-marker consistency.

Example download

An example collection of workbooks

Actual workbook used for marking with individual student sheets

Course workbook. Contains master student list. Collates grades for each assessment and calculates final course grade.

Readme for set-up instructions.

Blank workbook used to set-up the assessment template each semester

Instructions for the marker.

Course folder for a given semester

Download an example workbook set from (Note! this software is ‘pre-relase’ standard). http://www.transformingassessment.com/emarking.zip

Additional

Group wide grade statistics available as charts for each assessment and final course grades.Further help and guidance is provided in readme files and within the workbooks/sheets themselves.

Requirements / Notes

• Requires M.S. Excel (it works with 3003 and 2007 versions).• Functions such as student sheet duplication and bulk printing requires macros to be

enabled.• You will need to ‘permit content’ and ‘update links’.• Requires Acrobat Distiller to produce bulk PDFs (in future the use of a free PDF printer/or

distiller is planned – but individual sheets can still be printed using any free PDF print driver using the standard print command).

• Requires a once only edit of the macro to specify the location of the distiller application on your computer

• Assessment workbooks and the course workbook need to be manually linked on first use/set-up (student name lists and assessment totals), and for each subsequent offering use (i.e. Copy the workbook collection to a new folder for the next semester and re-link).

• Additional customisation to match your institution’s nomenclature, e.g. for grade labels/divisions, graduate qualities and the final grade sheet to match your LMS format, header/footer labels/logos.