By Janet Morrill
University of Manitoba  

In my experience, most professors report that the worst part of their job is marking.  It is time consuming, repetitive, and dull.  When you consider that most of us have increasingly large class sizes and many demands on our time, there is a strong incentive to adopt multiple choice exams and/or use student graders.  The decisions of what type of examination format to adopt, and whether or not to mark the exams yourself are important ones.  While these are classic cost/benefit decisions, my goal here is to identify some of the benefits that might not have been considered, particularly to marking examinations yourself, and to provide some suggestions to reduce the costs of whichever strategy is chosen.   

Multiple choice exams  

The obvious benefit of multiple choice exams is that they are easy to mark.  As well, it is often possible to get statistics such as the bi-serial correlation and the performance of students on each question, which allows you to determine which are the best questions and where students had difficulty (experts suggest that a bi-serial correlation between 0.3 and 0.5 is best, indicating that the question discriminated between students well and provides incremental information beyond the other questions on the exam).  Also, if the questions are re-used from one year to the next, they provide a quick and easy way to compare groups across time to track trends in student quality and help determine whether departures from historical grade distributions are warranted.   

The drawbacks of multiple choice exams are also obvious.  While it is possible to develop a really good multiple choice question, it is very time consuming.  There is also a tendency to “fill in” with questions that concentrate on unimportant details or test memorization rather than tapping higher order thinking skills.  This is particularly the case with the multiple choice questions contained in many textbook test banks.  There is no way to give part marks, and it is somewhat difficult to have context-rich application questions.  Finally, the professor has no opportunity to evaluate students’ writing and organizational skills.  If students only face multiple choice exams, they also have few incentives to develop these important skills.   

Using Student Graders  

The benefit of using student graders clearly is to save the professor’s time.  It is also an opportunity to provide income for students, particularly graduate students.  The drawbacks are also clear.  The quality of student graders varies substantially, and they should be supervised quite closely.  Therefore, the time savings for the professor may be somewhat less substantial than originally thought.  As well, to ensure high quality, consistent grading, exam questions must be chosen where the grading key can be completely specified and does not require a level of judgment or insight beyond the ability of your graders.    This is especially problematic for higher year courses: quite often the students have only just finished the course themselves, and if you are lucky enough to find a good grader, they graduate before you can use them again.   

Marking exams yourself  

In this case, let’s begin with the obvious drawback: your time and your sanity.  However, the benefits of doing your own marking are quite substantial, and I believe are often overlooked.  First, you are far less constrained regarding the types of questions you ask.  Questions that are more ambiguous or open ended, do not have “one right answer”, or permit students to express their opinions are possible.  Therefore, you can ask the questions that you think are best for your students - often these questions tap higher order thinking skills and are more like the types of questions that they will face “in the real world”.  Second, when students realize that they can handle that type of question, my experience is that they feel better about the course: they feel that your exams are “real world” and that the course has really taught them something.  Third, marking exams gives you a much better understanding of where your students are having difficulty.   

Through marking, I have learned of many common misconceptions that I never picked up on in class, and students rarely have the courage to reveal their confusion. By marking the exams, you can provide better feedback to your students and can identify common pitfalls that you can address in the future.  For example, I realized that many of my students thought a qualified audit opinion was good, because they thought that meant the opinion issuer was a qualified professional.  I am now careful to explain this terminology in my lectures.  Finally, marking exams is a terrific source of inspiration for future exam questions.  When I am marking, I keep a sheet of paper close by where I jot down ideas for future reference.   

Ways to minimize marking costs  

For each of the options identified, there are ways to minimize the costs.  In the case of multiple choice questions, I keep those precious, good multiple choice questions confidential and re-use them.  That is quite easy for final examinations as they are not handed back to students.  For midterm examinations I have the multiple choice questions on the last pages of the examination.  Those pages are torn off and are not returned to the student.  When the exam is handed back, I return the bubble sheets to the students so they can see what answer they gave, and we take up the questions in class.  Unfortunately, some professors have found that students change the answers on the bubble sheets and claim they were incorrectly marked.  If this is a concern, you can take a photocopy of the bubble sheets before returning them.   

For non-multiple choice exams, there are a few strategies you can use to simplify marking, regardless of whether the marking is done by students or by you.  Some suggestions include:  

• Do not use exam booklets.  With unlimited space, students have fewer clues about the length of answer you want, so they tend to run on.  As well, they may not answer the questions in order, so you spend a lot of time searching for their answers.  
• Avoid questions where the errors would “carry through”.  If the answer to part b) of a question depends on the answer to part a), your life becomes much more complicated.  The same person needs to mark both parts to be efficient and they need to check back to part a).  Finally, the deeper into the question that an error can be carried, the more divergent the student responses get and the less likely it is that your marking key will cover all the possible answers.  Markers often end up having to pull out their calculators to try to determine what the students’ answer should be, and it may be difficult to trace the student’s train of thought.  Errors in determining what the student’s answer should be and marking errors will be common.   An alternative is to give two separate and smaller questions.
• See if your institution will allow you to use the hours allocated to you for marking for research assistance instead.  If so, this allows you to strategically determine where your time is best spent.  
• Use tables for students’ answers.  While students do not have to use their own judgment and abilities to structure their answer (a drawback), it does simplify marking by organizing the answer and constraining their answering space.  For example, in my auditing class I often give the students a case.  Then, they are required to fill out a table containing a number of accounts and assertions.  For the given assertion, they need to assess inherent risk as high, medium or low, provide a justification for the assertion, and specify a substantive and an analytical procedure to test the assertion.  
• As is done by the professional associations, use tables for your marking key.  Particularly for case questions, this is a real time saver.  The marking key can contain all the things you’re looking for, and you photocopy one key for each student.  Rather than referring back to a marking key and marking the points on the student’s exam, mark the points that the student has earned on the marking sheet which is then stapled to the student’s exam.  You can also include sections for other things you’re evaluating, such as spelling and grammar, organization, professionalism and so on.  Marking is both faster and tends to be more accurate, and the students can instantly see how they could have organized their answer better and the points they missed.  
• Consider shorter exams.  While my reasoning is admittedly self-serving, I reason that a good two hour exam is better than a bad three hour exam, and my marking time is cut by a third.   
• Ask your colleagues for their tips.

Conclusion  

Many of these suggestions were developed from watching the way my colleagues handled a term paper in our introductory accounting class of 700 students.  The term paper required groups to compute ratios for two companies, interpret those ratios, and ultimately decide which company was healthier.  If a group made a mistake in the original ratios, that would affect the interpretations they would make and their final evaluation of the companies.  So, the term project was split into 3 parts that were due at different stages in the term.  Part 1 of the project consisted of a table containing several ratios.  Students had to fill in the ratio definitions and compute the ratios for the two companies.  That was marked by student graders, and was handed back to the students before they did part 2 of the project.  Part 2 was another table containing the computed ratios.  Students had to enter the meaning of the ratio, and assess which company was better.  All the students were then using the proper ratios, so there were no carry-forward errors.  Again, this was marked by student graders and handed back before the students began part 3, which was to make an overall assessment of the two firms.  Part 3 was marked by the professors using a photocopied marking key.  Students found the project to be very enriching and built their self confidence, and by carefully structuring the project, the marking burden was minimal, even for 700 students.