Last year I worked at a grade 7 and 8 school that licensed an LMS called Schoology. The user interface is very much like Facebook, and I and the students found it easy to use. I taught math exclusively, to 3 grade 7 classes and 3 grade 8 classes. While I often did creative assignments that I would mark by hand, I set up some tests on Schoology for automated marking. Yes, it saved me an enormous amount of time, but I tried to ensure that the tests asked rich questions and were valid. Some were multiple choice and some involved filling in the blanks with the right answers but with both of these options they could be marked automatically by the system. Some were multi-step problems where the student would have to fill in the blank at each stage of the problem, thus could still get part marks while being assessed by the answers pre-programmed into Schoology. Because it was a French immersion program, I would sometimes have to override the system if someone put in the English answer 36.5 rather than the French 36,5, and for other issues of misunderstanding I could go back in and give part marks.
Anyway, despite the tests being rich, and flexible, people complained to the principal, and based on his directive, I could use them as “quizzes” for formative assessment but not as “tests” for summative assessment? Why not? I still don’t know. Really, I think it was because it was perceived as me taking a short cut and not doing all the work that my predecessors had to do! Let’s face it, most math teachers since the advent of the school house have marked math assignments by looking at the answer and marking it right or wrong. If it is wrong, we look back at the process and identify where the thinking led to the incorrect answer. Is it really necessary that such a job be done by a human?