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