Tool Spotlight: Crowdmark

What Is It?

A powerful assessment and grading platform, Crowdmark helps instructors optimize their grading time and provide clear, consistent, actionable feedback to students. It can be used for in-person or online exams, homework, and other student work.  

The Crowdmark grading tools, including annotation, a robust comment library, and several ways to track points for graded elements, give new graders important guidance when grading while also giving lead instructors easy visibility into the progress and quality of the team’s grading work.

The result is a grading experience that saves time for instructors, supports collaboration within grading teams, and delivers timely, meaningful feedback that enhances student learning. 

What Do Instructors Say About It?

Crowdmark is commonly used at Northwestern by instructors of large classes with grading teams. They appreciate the ability to oversee grading. Gayle Ratliff, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Physics, says, "It has made grading, often with 6 or more TAs, so much easier because we can monitor each other’s comments and make adjustments across the entire assessment if needed." Crowdmark also has a variety of settings around grading anonymity, which ensures grading integrity and privacy for both students and graders.

Crowdmark facilitates robust and timely feedback to students. Since grading is conducted more efficiently than traditional, paper-based grading, students get their results sooner and they get more feedback than if grading were done by hand. Additionally, Aaron Greicius, Professor of Instruction in Math, shares, "The comment boxes have a markup language enabled that allow for easy typesetting of technical writing as well as easy formatting (headers, ordered and unordered lists, text emphasis, etc.)"

Crowdmark also provides academic integrity protection. Aaron Peterson, Professor of Instruction in Math, says, "After papers are returned to students, I can confidently correct scoring errors without worrying that students altered or amended their papers."

As a bonus, Crowdmark customer support is outstanding. Kre Britt, administrator in the Chemistry department, says, " We've found Crowdmark support to be responsive and timely."

How Does It Work?

Crowdmark integrates with Canvas, allowing courses and enrollments from Canvas to populate in Crowdmark and the grades from Crowdmark to pass back to Canvas. Instructors log into Crowdmark and import a course from Canvas into Crowdmark. After importing students and grading team members, the instructor can then create an assessment and distribute it to students (in person or online).

When students are done testing, their work is uploaded to Crowdmark and then graded by the grading team using grading tools that include advanced annotation and a point-based comment library. When grading is done, instructors release results and grading comments to students and sync the grades to Canvas.

Tool Time Updates

Keep up with the latest updates to tools supported by Northwestern IT:

• Thanks to suggestions by Northwestern instructors, Padlet now offers enhanced options for anonymous postings. You can now hide author names for both posts and comments if anonymity is preferred. Check out this update in the “Sharing and Privacy” section of the Canvas Learning Center
• Did you know that Respondus offers a number of new options for Respondus Lockdown Browser and Monitor, including the option to add a second camera, enable screen-only recording, and allowing Word and Excel with Monitor.