How I grade 200 exams every year
Three years ago, I took the introductory machine learning course over from Milan Straka, and one of the problems I had to deal with was: how do I grade 250 written exams without it consuming my entire life? (Part of the answer is of course ask colleagues for help, but this blog post is about technical stuff that is making it easier.)
Milan had already established one good constraint: there is a fixed public list of exam questions that students can prepare for in advance. Each exam should cover the whole semester. The questions are open-ended and expect roughly a third-to-half page of actual thinking.
I had my own requirements on top of that. Questions aren’t equally difficult, so I didn’t want students to just have bad