marking exams

Crowdmark successfully pilots two-stage exams in North America

October 21, 2015
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

Crowdmark's two-stage exam interface. — A screenshot of Crowdmark’s two-stage exam interface.

TORONTO, Oct. 21, 2015 – Working with five leading universities in North America during 2014-15, Crowdmark Inc., a collaborative online grading and analytics platform, has demonstrated the benefits and advantages of using two-stage examinations in a number of undergraduate programs in post-secondary institutions across the world.

Crowdmark has worked with universities to introduce two-stage exams as a way to integrate collaborative learning and assessment into the traditional exam format. In a two-stage exam, students individually complete the exam and then, working in groups of three to four, immediately complete the exam again. This method provides students with immediate feedback through discussion with their peers as they deliberate the most correct response. The two-stage exam provides feedback on individual performance while increasing students’ engagement and comprehension of course content.

James Colliander, Crowdmark Founder/CEO and Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia is encouraged by the reception two-stage exams have received at universities in North America.

“The experiments with two-stage exams last spring were very informative and helped shape our platform to support a new and emerging assessment scenario,” says Colliander. “Also with feedback from our customers, we made elegant improvements allowing Crowdmark to be used for other assessment types including lab reports and group projects.”

UTEST grad Crowdmark profiled in The Globe and Mail article

February 18, 2014
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

Crowdmark Logo: Grade Better Crowdmark, a graduate of the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program’s first cohort, was the focus of a February 17 article by Ivor Tossell, The Globe and Mail‘s technology culture columnist.

Dr. James Colliander, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark — **Dr. James Colliander**, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark.

Created by U of T professor James Colliander, Crowdmark allows educators to quickly and efficiently grade large amounts of tests and exams. Tossell highlighted Crowdmark’s innovation and ease-of-use for the grader. The product is cloud-based, meaning that a team of educators marking the same group of exams don’t have to be in the same room at the same time. Instead, grading can be done remotely.

Tossell spoke with Colliander and Lyssa Neel, Crowdmark’s chief operating officer and a former MI project manager. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

James Colliander, a professor at the University of Toronto, found himself staring at about 5,000 pages of papers from a national math exam. Traditionally, a cadre of markers would sit around a large table for marathon grading sessions, assembly line style, each one tackling the answer to one question before passing it on to the next marker.

Mr. Colliander hacked together an expedient: He scanned the pages into a software framework and distributed them to markers digitally. He was essentially able to parallelize the marking process.

Dr. Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark and former MI project manager.

“The markers didn’t all have to be in the same place, so they could move much faster,” says Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark, the company that, with Mr. Colliander as CEO, has brought the idea to market.

Crowdmark is an online service that takes the idea of distributed marking and scales it to an institutional level.

Crowdmark announces new partnership with Ricoh Canada Inc.

January 23, 2014
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

Crowdmark, a MaRS Innovation and University of Toronto start-up incubated through the UTEST program, has reached a deal with Ricoh Canada Inc.

Announced January 20, 2014, the deal outlines national printing and scanning service for Crowdmark customers, with U.S. discussions coming up in the future, to improve the start-up’s online marking process for teachers.

Here’s an excerpt from the release (emphasis ours):

Toronto, Ontario (January 20, 2014) – Crowdmark Inc., a software company that delivers an ultra-scalable collaborative assessment platform to educators worldwide, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Ricoh Canada Inc., to support Crowdmark’s customers, and with plans to explore additional enhancements to the relationship that will deliver additional client benefits.

Today’s announcement covers standardized terms and pricing from Ricoh Canada to provide a national printing and scanning service to Crowdmark’s customers in post-secondary institutions and K-12 school systems across Canada. Discussions about a similar service for USA-based Crowdmark customers are next on the agenda.

Yonge Street Media: Crowdmark, moderated marking and helping teachers grade better

June 19, 2013
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

Yonge Street Media, a weekly online magazine that covers talent, innovation, diversity and quality of life stories in the Toronto region, covered Crowdmark‘s efforts to disrupt the way teachers grade and interact with students in their Innovation section on Wednesday, June 19, 2013.

Crowdmark graduated from the UTEST program earlier this spring. Last week, the company announced it has raised $600,000 in seed funding and completed two successful proof-of-concept pilot projects. Its co-founders are from the University of Toronto.

Here’s an excerpt from Hamutal Dotan‘s article (emphasis ours):

It is the bane of every teacher’s existence: grading. Though essential, it’s also repetitive and time-consuming. It is also increasingly prone to concerns about inequity: from grade inflation to inconsistent standards across different classrooms, sometimes parents, students, and even teachers themselves have a hard time deciding just what the grades they have assigned actually mean.

Aiming to help with both those problems is Toronto startup Crowdmark. Founded by two University of Toronto mathematics experts–the department’s associate chair, James Colliander, and graduate student Martin Muñoz–Crowdmark provides teachers with a suite of tools to facilitate faster grading, and enables teachers to handle large volumes of grading collaboratively.

Crowdmark’s grading software featured in EdSurge

March 18, 2013
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

Exam pain is not limited to students, notes Tony Wan of EdSurge in his profile of UTEST start-up company, Crowdmark.

The article, “Crowdmark Lends a Helping Hand with Handwritten Assessments: How one savvy professor is scaling human grading capabilities for handwritten responses” appeared Mar. 17, 2013.

Here’s an excerpt:

Dr. James Colliander, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark. Photo courtesy of Denise Grant. Used with permission.

James Colliander, a Professor Mathematics at the University of Toronto, knew this pain all too well. As a grader for the 2011 Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge, he and a team of volunteers had to deal with 70,000 pages of hand-written responses, a “tremendously inefficient, logistical nightmare” that involved paper shuffling and moving boxes of exams.

That’s when he started working on a way to scale human assessment capabilities. In April 2011, Colliander joined UTEST (University of Toronto Early Stage Technology), an incubator launched by the University of Toronto and MaRS Innovation, to work on his solution, Crowdmark.

marking exams

Crowdmark successfully pilots two-stage exams in North America

Crowdmark announces new partnership with Ricoh Canada Inc.

Yonge Street Media: Crowdmark, moderated marking and helping teachers grade better

Crowdmark’s grading software featured in EdSurge

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