Make Grading Easier

Task: For years, Professor Meerts used a spreadsheet to manage the results of the peer evaluation data from her class (a student evaluates 3 other students and himself/herself). The evaluation is a blend of scales (1-5) and comments, which count towards grades. Before, she made a file for every student, and manually copied the right information from the spreadsheet into files she made. Then, Meerts removed self-evaluations, calculated every student’s average scale, and graded her/him accordingly. Finally, a student received his/her peer feedback from Meerts. With multiple evaluations in one term, this process was time-consuming.

Goal & Result: To make grading easier for professors. Using Jimmy’s R script, Professor Meerts gets an organized pdf file report for each of her students. Each file has an average evaluation score for that student (self-evaluation removed), as well as the verbal comments from their peers. This makes the evaluation process more robust and less onerous at the same time.