About
TableQuiz is a tool that allows teachers to create, assign, and grade short-answer quizzes in a table format. By using this tool, teachers can grade a large number of short answer quizzes in minutes, while still accounting for spelling mistakes and any other unexpected answers that students may provide. Get TableQuiz here!
I myself am a high school Latin teacher, and when my district first introduced 1:1 technology, I immediately started to look at ways to assess and grade my students electronically. While I was initially impressed with various options for creating multiple choice assessments, I was very dissatisfied with any software available to grade written (or in this case, typed) assessments. From what I saw, if I wanted to give my students electronic answers that required short answer responses (in my case, vocabulary), then I only had 2 choices:
- Limit my students to the answers I keyed ahead of time
- Continue to grade each question by hand.
Hand-grading short answer questions seemed like a waste of my valuable prep time, but I didn't want to limit my students to keyed answers either. After all, I had already seen my students make countless typos and misspellings, and I certainly didn't want to penalize any students who came up with a correct answer that I had neglected to enter into my key. I really wanted a program that could automate the bulk of this process while still giving me the flexibility needed to properly grade the great variety of acceptable responses to any short answer assessment. That's when I started to write TableQuiz.
TableQuiz has all the features you would expect from an electronic assessment tool, but at its core, it's built around the ability to quickly grade flexible responses. Like any other electronic assessment, you'll create a key for each TableQuiz, and the program will use the key to automatically grade the majority of answers. Whenever you give the assessment, however, TableQuiz will also generate a list of incorrect answers that were submitted by students. Looking at this list, you can quickly catch any acceptable variants of an answer and add them to the key. Once you do this, TableQuiz will update all students' scores appropriately and update the key. TableQuiz will remember answers you already checked and will be able to automatically grade those answers if you give the same assessment again in the future.
This tool has been a lot of work for me to create, but even with all the work I put into coding, it has overall saved time for me. I used to spend 30 minutes to an hour grading a stack of vocab quizzes, but now I can do the same work in under 5 minutes. This has really freed up my schedule so that I can devote more time to prepping and teaching my students rather than the far less rewarding "busywork" that often comes with the teaching profession. TableQuiz also redefined the way I develop my students' study habits as the quick grading has allowed me to do short, tiered assessments at the start of each class period.
After experiencing the impact that this tool has had on my classroom, I pushed myself to ensure that TableQuiz was user-friendly and well-documented so that I could share it with others who devote so much time and energy to the teaching profession.