2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Offering Partial Credits in Exams Created Using Blackboard Quiz Pools in Mechanical Engineering Courses

Abstract

Instructors give homework and exams to help students apply what they are learning in class. Grading them is time-consuming for the instructor or teaching assistant, and the feedback to the students comes at a time when they are no longer thinking of the problem. In addition, many students obtain access to textbook solutions. Some book publishers (e.g., Pearson's Mastering Engineering and McGraw Hill's Connect) provide automated grading for homework problems. However, using a publisher's grading site is an additional student expense.
To keep the benefits of automated grading without the cost to the students, question pools in Blackboard were created for textbook problems but using different numbers. The same method was also used for exams, allowing each student to have a different exam than other students in the class. The exam was graded by Blackboard's automated grading system as either correct or incorrect, regardless of whether the student never understood the concept or made a minor calculation error.
To address this shortfall, students were offered a chance to upload their detailed work after the exam for potential partial credits. Students often fully understood the concept and problem-solving process but made minor calculation errors. In those cases, the instructor can review their detailed work and decide if the student's effort is worth some partial credits.
At the end of the semester, the students completed a survey about their experiences with the automated grading systems. Students found the grading helpful and appreciated not having the extra expense of a textbook grading system. They particularly liked the partial credit mechanism for the exams. This paper will focus primarily on the partial credit mechanism's impact on overall student performance. It was found that students were more motivated to learn and to prepare for the exams with the partial credit mechanism, as illustrated through the semester-end survey.
At the present time, the detailed work students presented for partial credit are reviewed manually by the instructor. In the long run, the authors would like to seek a semi-automated process of gathering and/or grading the detailed work to support the partial credit mechanism.