I currently teach KS4 and 5 Cambridge International Exams. One of the papers students sit is a challenging multiple-choice question paper which is marked via OMR sheets or Optical Mark Recognition. Mostly in school, I simply assess Paper 1/2 past papers by having students circle the correct answer on the question paper. One of the benefits of this are that I can see any annotations students have made (and I highly encourage this!) as it can help pinpoint misconceptions or errors. However, I have found marking this way time-consuming. Also, it doesn’t provide an opportunity for students to get a good feel for the real exam or allow them to practice the time-management element when they need to transfer their final answers onto the OMR answer sheet.
A chance conversation with a colleague in the American section of my school led me to discover Zipgrade. A website and App combination which allows you to make up your own OMR answer sheets and mark tests by digitally scanning with your phone or tablet. I immediately saw the benefit of this to the courses I teach; some of which are 30% assessed via MCQs!
The process of getting started has involved a lot of trial and error and I am grateful to my Year 9 students who willingly took a chance trialing Zipgrade in short end-of-unit assessments.
Benefits
Very fast marking of answers to MCQs – three class sets of MCQ tests can be marked in around 15 minutes. For some short quizzes, I have had the marks back to the class before the lesson ended and have been able to go over the questions most students found tricky under the visualiser. This specific, immediate, verbal feedback is high impact and students responded positively.
Zipgrade offers a student portal that allows the students to log in and see their results as soon as you publish them. Stopping the all-too-common “have you marked the test yet comments?”
Questions can be ‘tagged’ by the content or syllabus reference providing a quick insight into the areas that may need to be retaught or clarified and directing students to the specific areas they need to develop or revisit. This feature really makes Zipgrade an excellent tool for formative assessment.
Barriers
Students (and teachers!) need to learn how to use the OMR sheets effectively. Through trial and error and conversations with my students, I developed a set of instructions for the front of the papers that helped eliminate some of the more common problems. Even so, it takes a few times for the students to know what to do and manage time in the test/quiz to transcribe their answers on the OMR.
Setting up is tricky and a little time-consuming at first. Student details need to be added to classes before you can get Student Portal log-in details. The tags have to be created before being added to questions and creating custom answer sheets can take some additional time. This has gotten quicker the more I used it though and the payoff after in terms of time saved is invaluable.
It does provide less insight into the students thinking on individual questions than close marking of the papers. However, I have gone some way to overcome this by keeping the question papers and going in to review if a lot of students have given a wrong answer.
Lastly, the free version allows for grading 100 papers a month. After this, there is a small charge for unlimited grading – though I believe it is absolutely worth the cost at $6.99 a year.
Overall, I have been really impressed with Zipgrade and my student’s feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I really see value in it, especially for courses that have an MCQ assessment element such as CIE.
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