Atomic Grader (Ag for short) is a new automated grading system a friend and I developed for the Stanford Math Tournament.
Running a math tournament presents some unique logistical challenges. At its peak, SMT hosted about 800 competitors on over 100 teams. Each competitor took two individual tests, and each team completed two additional team tests. It's convenient to hold the entire tournament in a single day, so this means we have nearly 2000 tests to grade in only a few hours. Doing this on paper is logistically difficult and error-prone, despite our long-standing practice of ensuring each paper was graded by at least two people.
As grading had become the critical bottleneck on competition day, we set out to design and implement an improved system. The result, Atomic Grader, was a huge success.
How it works, in brief:
More about SMT.
Atomic Grader on Github.
The paper I wrote, with many more technical details.
Running a math tournament presents some unique logistical challenges. At its peak, SMT hosted about 800 competitors on over 100 teams. Each competitor took two individual tests, and each team completed two additional team tests. It's convenient to hold the entire tournament in a single day, so this means we have nearly 2000 tests to grade in only a few hours. Doing this on paper is logistically difficult and error-prone, despite our long-standing practice of ensuring each paper was graded by at least two people.
As grading had become the critical bottleneck on competition day, we set out to design and implement an improved system. The result, Atomic Grader, was a huge success.
How it works, in brief:
- Students are given stickers at check-in. Each sticker contains a uniquely identifying QR code, the student's name, and the time and location of their test. This greatly reduced students' confusion about where to be and when, another longstanding problem.
- Students write their answers on paper as usual, and attach their sticker to the top.
- When we receive them, each answer sheet is scanned. We then use some computer vision to extract the QR code and identify the student, extract each answer box, and detect empty answers. This is all uploaded to our webserver.
- Graders can grade student answers online, using the web app we developed. This is much faster and more streamlined than shuffling paper around, and we could recruit graders from across the country to further speed things up.
- Ag automatically tabulates results and generates score reports we can use to promptly announce winners and print awards.
More about SMT.
Atomic Grader on Github.
The paper I wrote, with many more technical details.