SLO Pathways Grader

written by Chris

The SLO Pathways Grader is a Google Sheets add-on which aids in the correlation of Student Learning Objectives with optical-scan grading output.

Setup

Begin use of the SLO Pathways Grader by running the “Setup>Initial Setup” action.  This will create two sheets which we will use throughout the rest of the process.

  • TrackedQuestions: This sheet lists the assignments you will be tracking and the questions on each that you will be using.  Row 1 should contain the names of each of your assignments.  Under each assignment, list the questions you wish to track for a specific Pathways objective.
    • Question naming convention
      • In the event of a single-key assignment, specify your questions as “Q #” where # is the question number.  EG: “Q 1” or “Q 34”.  Note the space between “Q” and the number.
      • In the event of a multi-key assignment, specify your questions with the key ID, followed by a colon and then the question identifier shown above.  EG: “A:Q 1” or “B:Q 34”.  Note the lack of a space between the key identifier, the colon, and the letter “Q”.  Note the presence of a space between the letter “Q” and the number.
    • Other caveats
      • You may specify exactly one question per cell
      • Question order does not matter
      • Assignments may have different numbers of tracked questions
  • Bounds&Results: This sheet indicates the bounds which will constitute the lower and upper bounds of the “fail,” “pass,” and “exceed” categories.
    • Results will be displayed in the “Students” column at the end of the grading process

Importing Optical Scan Results

Once initial setup is complete you can import your OpScan results.  Run the “Setup > Create Scantron Sheets” command to create sheets into which to paste your OpScan reports.

  • The system will create assignment sheets corresponding to the names of the assignments you specified in your “TrackedQuestions” sheet
  • Copy-and-paste the entire results sheet for each assignment into the corresponding created tab.

Generating Results

With setup complete, we’re ready to run the grader.  Operation of the grader consists of three steps which must be executed in order.

  1. Grade Assignments: This assesses if a student’s answer to a question matches the correct answer as indicated on the key corresponding to their exam version.  During this step a series of intermediary sheets will be created corresponding to assignment/key pairs.
  2. Compile Student Data: This step pulls together student answers to tracked questions in preparation for final assessment.  During this step an intermediary sheet called “StudentAnswers” will be created.
  3. Collate Assessment: This step will assess the number of students who fall into the Fail, Pass, and Exceed categories defined in the Bounds&Results tab with results shown in the Students column.  Note that these values are calculated at the time that “Collate Assessment” is run, not live when the sheet is loaded.  If you change the bounds, you will have to re-run the “Collate Assessment” step.