By Patrick Lyons, Director, Teaching and Learning, TLS
As indicated in the November 2022 TLS newsletter, TLS is celebrating its 30th anniversary. To help recognize this milestone, we thought we’d share stories of teaching and learning from our past.
This is our fourth story in the series. Catch up on our previous story, A Lesson Learned, here. Also, don’t forget to save the date for the 30th Anniversary Teaching Panel on May 10, 2023.
Fooled
Photo by olio creative on Unsplash
“The Scantron multiple-choice marking machine has become sentient! The university is returning to WebCT! Data projector bulbs are in short supply, and class projectors must be rationed! Slate prices are going through the roof – so no more chalkboards at Carleton! Overhead projectors are the way of the future!”
If you were around Carleton in 2014 and 2015, you might recall some of the above news items published in the TLS April Fools newsletter. The idea to write and distribute these foolish stories was our attempt to replicate what other organizations and companies did on April Fools’ Day: Google announcing its Scratch and Sniff feature for online books, Youtube’s homepage videos all linking to Rick Astley’s song “Never gonna give you up,” or Westjet’s announcement that it was mixing helium into cabin air systems to reduce the weight of its planes (and lower ticket prices).
I liked this tradition and having fallen for pranks pulled on me by my family and friends on April 1 (my daughter replacing my coffee with coke was a good one), I thought it would be fun to adopt the tradition at Carleton with the TLS newsletter.
Here’s a sample from the 2015 newsletter:
“For reasons not yet determined or understood, the Scantron machine incorrectly scored questions where the correct response is ‘c.’ This means that in any exam where students correctly responded by filling in the ‘c’ bubble on their Scantron answer sheets, the exam was scored incorrectly, and the Scantron machine counted every ‘c’ response as incorrect.
Error reports from our Scantron machine suggest that it disagrees with answer ‘c’ and would prefer that instructors with multiple choice exams pick other letters for correct answers.”
I thought the stories would be humorous and the community would be bemused. But, shortly after sending the newsletters, we started receiving several emails looking to reserve classroom data projector time and requests to rescore Scantron exams. Others wrote asking if this was an April Fools’ joke (and saying nice try…). But we also received at least one complaint that made it up to the Dean’s, Provost’s, and Associate Vice-President, Teaching and Learning’s offices.
I wrote an apology to the community which generated another flurry of emails from instructors but this time, wondering why there had to be an apology for what they thought was funny.
But, TLS hasn’t published an April Fools’ newsletter since. As I learned, what I thought was humorous, others receive as a waste of time, misleading, or just not funny. That being said, in reviewing these two old newsletters to write this story, one item seems to have foreseen the future. It relates to Artificial Intelligence and grading from April 1, 2015:
“Automarker+
After extensive testing, the AutoMarker+ plugin for cuLearn, developed in collaboration with the School of Computer Science, will be available to all instructors beginning May 4 (the start of the summer term).
AutoMarker+ helps instructors mark student papers and assignments by comparing them to an extensive database of student work from across North America and students’ work within the class submitting the assignment. This system uses the power of heuristic analysis and artificial intelligence to score students’ work and establishes a preliminary grade for the assignment. Instructors can review the preliminary grades for each student’s assignment or set the plugin to automatic mode. In automatic mode, AutoMarker+ requires no instructor intervention. It will finalize all grades, enter them into cuLearn’s Gradebook, and notify students of their grades by text, email, or tweet. Note: We do not recommend using Twitter to release student grade information due to FIPPA concerns.”
Believe it or not – As part of the Innovation Fellowship, TLS and Doug Howe (Computer Science) are currently piloting Gradescope, a grading workflow product that integrates into Brightspace that uses Artificial Intelligence to help mark student computer programming assignments! And… that’s no joke!
So, while I might not have a career as a comedian, I could explore crystal ball gazing as an alternative…
We hope to see you at TLS 30th Anniversary Teaching Panel on May 10 to be held in the Future Learning Lab.