How to grade term papers, assignments and exams quickly with HILO
The grade is up to whoever grades: HILO gathers what each paper says about each concept, but it doesn’t assess or assign grades.
Define the concepts or criteria you’re going to look at
Write the list of the main concepts to assess. For each one, note which other words it may appear under, because students don’t always use the term from class.
Build the course folder with all the papers
Build a folder for the whole course, upload all the papers to be assessed to it and load them all at once.
In each paper, gather each concept
Open a paper and gather a concept: everything the document says about that topic appears in sequence in the workstation. Repeat with the other concepts or topics and move on to the next paper with the same list.
Read the passages in context and assess
Read the passages for each concept (HILO also shows you the previous and next paragraphs). If no passage appears, try another word before concluding it’s missing. If you like, you can fix the text directly in each passage.
Give feedback to the student (optional)
Put together the feedback with what you found: which concepts are best developed and where the paper is weakest.
Other ways to do it
You can do it with Word’s find tool (search for the concept in each file and read every result), with a rubric in a spreadsheet, or with the assessment tools of your institution’s platform.
HILO is a good fit when you grade many papers and want to see each concept in its context: it runs in the browser, with nothing to install, and gathering by keyword doesn’t require signing up. Another tool is a better fit to detect plagiarism, correct style or grammar, or keep the grades.
Grade your own course
Create a folder, upload the papers and gather the first concept.
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