2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Automated grading is helpful for students, providing them with rapid feedback, which allows them to increase their learning by providing the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Automation also assists professors by reducing the time they spend grading student work. Previous work showed that students preferred using an automated grading system to having a TA grade their work.
A web-based system has been developed based on the email-based system currently being used at the university. Interfaces were developed for grading AutoCAD, SOLIDWORKS, Excel and LabVIEW files. From the student perspective, students choose the assignment they are submitting and then upload the appropriate file(s). The back end of the web page grades the student's work, providing textual and graphical feedback on their submission. On the web page, students can review their scores for each assignment and access the scoring report and submitted files for each submission.
From the professor's perspective, classes are created by uploading a file with the problems and corresponding due dates and the class lists from the learning management for each section. Once the professor makes a class, they can access the students' view to practice submitting assignments. In addition, they can view each student's grades on each assignment in a section. By clicking on a student's score, they can retrieve each student's submitted files and the grading feedback that the student received.
Students in one class with four sections used the web page for AutoCAD and Excel. One class with two sections used the SOLIDWORKS grading function. One class used the LabVIEW grading interface. An additional class used the Excel grading feature. At the end of the semester, students were surveyed concerning their experience utilizing the grading web page. Students were more favorable for the web page format than the same survey used for the email grading system.
Another benefit of shifting to the web is having multiple machines process grading requests. Having multiple machines processing requests speeds up the response for the students and leads to possible commercialization of the grading system.